sutton010

My four week and counting streak of completing these CEU courses on time was nearly derailed by the winter storm that kept my children and most of the city home yesterday, but I managed to squeeze in some CEU time while my husband entertained the children with after dinner driveway clearing. I took the HFA, AS, & NVLD: Differential Diagnosis by the SLP course at LinguiSystems and received 0.3 CEUs or 3 hours of Continuing Education Credit. (HFA - High Functioning Autism, AS - Asperger's Syndrome, NVLD - Nonverbal Learning Disorder) I completely forgot that this is the one course in the 7-week free CEU curriculum that is 0.3 CEUs instead of 0.2 CEU's. I was also rushing things a bit due to having to squeeze this into the evening rather than "leisurely" engaging with the material while my children were at preschool. Therefore I struggled a little more with this course than with the others. However, this course is interesting. Even if you have no need to act...

Here's a summary of the background that led up to this post in equation format. Decision to Homeschool + Type A Personality Driven Homeschool Planner = Desire to Understand and Organize the Missouri State Teaching Standards . As a brief aside, for those of you familiar enough with current events in teaching standards to wonder, Missouri has indeed adopted the Common Core Standards in Language Arts and Math. I did consider using the Common Core standards instead of the Missouri specific state standards in those areas. However, after reviewing both the common core standards and the Missouri State standards in those two areas I decided that the Missouri standards were fairly well aligned with the common core standards and gave more specific guidance and more detail. They worked better for me and so I decided to make my checklist from the Missouri State Standards across the board. When I dug into the standards I realized that the format provided online (multi-grade level chart...

I wanted a homeschooling planner. Searching online I came across a huge resource of printables for creating a custom homeschool planner on the New Bee Homeschooler website. Their guide and free resources are amazing. They are absolutely the inspiration for the planner I made for myself. I wanted to customize the pages and since, as you know, I'm a more than a little Type A I made my own planner using Microsoft Publisher. First, I wanted my planner to be half-size. I knew that a full-size planner would be bulky when opened and I want to keep my planner handy at the table when I'm working with the kids. The New Bee planner sheets are all full size. Second, I just wanted to put my own spin on most of the elements. This is how my planner turned out. Making a Custom, Printable Homeschooling Planner Cover Here's my cover. It's fairly basic. I decided on an academic year that goes from July through June to match Missouri's school year. The cover includes the d...

This week I took the Introduction to Ethical Decision Making in Speech-Language Pathology course at LinguiSystems and received 0.2 CEUs or 2 hours of Continuing Education Credit. I will admit that I was initially unenthusiastic about this one. However, as it turns out, I enjoyed it. I haven't done a lot of reading in the area of professional ethics, so it was pretty new to me. About 50-65% of the information covered in the course pertains to adult / medical speech-pathology practice, but the other half pertains to pediatric scenarios. I found the discussion about the four main tenants of professional ethical decision making (respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) to be useful and keeping this information in mind during practice would definitely help in prioritizing and decision making. In summary, I found the Introduction to Ethical Decision Making in Speech-Language Pathology to be an easy, interesting read. The information covered in the cour...

Once I finally made the decision to homeschool , my attention has been completely focused on homeschool planning and my blogging has predictably decreased. I will try to find more balance. Of course, we've also weathered two stomach bugs, 4 colds, one case of croup, one episode of pink eye, and an ear infection that was only detected through a failed hearing screening at an annual checkup. I feel like I've been handling administering multiple doses of prescription and over the counter meds every day to multiple children for a solid month. On the homeschooling front I've been busy. I decided that if I was going to homeschool kindergarten I should familiarize myself with the Missouri State Standards for kindergarten. I found them here: Missouri State Standards . One thing led to another and in my usual obsessive way I ended up making my own checklists. I'll post them for anyone who happens to be interested in a couple of days. I've created a printable che...

This week I took the Intervention Programming for Nonverbal Children course at LinguiSystems and received 0.2 CEUs or 2 hours of Continuing Education Credit. This course was really fantastic. If you're working with really young children who have limited verbal skills and are wondering where to begin, this course takes you through the basics. It begins by reviewing the pragmatic prerequisites that are necessary for verbal communication: joint attention and turn taking. Then the author reviews pragmatic acts that are essential in communication: greetings, initiation/requesting, and negating/protesting. All five of these pragmatic skills are often valid targets with nonverbal or minimally verbal children. Then she discusses vocabulary intervention in terms of what to target and how to target it. She offers many, many practical suggestions for how to structure therapy with this population. She provides links to internet resources that can be used in planning thematic therapy ...

It's a good thing I committed to taking these online CEU courses once a week. I'll admit, I left things to the last possible minute this time. This week I took the Evidence-Based Practice course at LinguiSystems and received 0.2 CEUs or 2 hours of Continuing Education Credit. This was a very nice course on why clinical decisions and therapy methods should be based on a combination of high-quality research evidence, practitioner expertise, and client preferences and values. The course discusses how to locate research and evaluate the quality of that research. It also discusses what to do if you cannot find high-quality research available to answer a specific question. I really do believe evidence-based practice is critical to efficacy in therapy. Two years ago, when it became apparent to me that Ava's speech was significantly delayed in a manner consistent with a motor-speech disorder (apraxia) I knew that I didn't know enough about apraxia treatment to help her....