Have you read the book the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo?

There are some cheesy parts in this book where she explains that you should say “thank you” to your clothing for either their hard work or for teaching you that you don’t need “yachting” clothes.  It’s surprisingly effective though in letting go of some items that are hard to throw away.

My favorite part is how she sorts items by categories.  It is an efficient way of realizing how much you have in your home. I’ve spent the last six months cleaning out my home. If you feel overwhelmed with clutter, I definitely recommend checking out this book. You can click on the picture below to use my affiliate link if you are interested.

Check out my before and after closet.  Yikes!  I ended up with about 10 bags of clothing that brought me no joy.  Now it only takes half the time for me to get ready in the morning-because I’m not pushing aside clothing I don’t like or that don’t fit correctly.

Actually, I’m not here to talk to you about purging your home. Instead I’m going to dare you to try to purge your speech room.  Within the allowed confines of disposing of school property, of course… 

I recommend trying to do this the day that the garbage company is coming as you will have some doubts and will likely try to retrieve some of your items.  You don’t want to be known at school as the one who dove into the dumpster to rescue her binders.  Take it from the one who got locked in a dumpster enclosure.  True story.  If you can’t manage sorting through at garbage day, then at least try to contaminate the bag by putting someone else’s dirty tissue in it, or have one of your students spit in the bag.

For each category, you will want to gather all of your items together so you can see what you have.  It makes it easier to sort through or see duplicates of items.  That’s how I realized that I have 9 different types of mailboxes for my clients to mail cards.  9.  That seems excessive, even to me.  

 

10 areas to organize in your speech room

Tidying toys 

I love using real toys and objects in therapy when appropriate.  Since I work with all ages, I’ve accumulated quite a variety of toys over the years.  Here’s what I got rid of:

• Old battery operated toys that don’t work.
• Oddly designed toys
• Toys you haven’t used in the last year.
• Baby toys that you never use
• Broken/stained items

I like to keep some of the older Fisher Price sets-because I think that they encourage more pretend play skills than the newer sets with sound and tons of details.  You can also save smaller items such as doll accessories to make a category kit.  See my post on SPEECH KITS for more information on what to save.

Tidying Containers

As an SLP hoarder, I am constantly buying dollar store/dollar spot containers that are PERFECT to put picture cards in.  I’ve got plastic garbage cans that the cards didn’t quite fit in, different colored basket pins, trash cans that I was hoping to turn into a parrot and a set of multi -colored metal mail boxes.  These were going to be PERFECT for me to work on multi step directions.  

Say thank you to your containers that you haven’t used.  I did keep a Spiderman and TMNT easter basket and a talking cookie jar that I use.

Tidying Games  

The first game I threw out was mouse trap because that game NEVER gives me joy.  My clients LOVE it-but I need quick play games that involve minimal effort from me.  I focused on keeping games that were really easy to play, games that encourage lots of repetitions, or games that focused on early developing speech sounds.  I threw away:

• Games that have broken parts
• Games where the boxes are completely destroyed and all of the pieces fall out every time you grab it.  (or if I loved it, I found a great plastic storage box).
• Games that didn’t work well in therapy (Monopoly, Mouse Trap, etc.)
• Games I hadn’t played yet.
• Themed game boards that kids no longer recognize.  Time to get rid of that Frazzle rock game.  
• Games that I don’t know how to play.

Tidying Sticker sheets

Do you have clients who enjoy stickers at the end of therapy?  If you have a box of thousands of stickers that take kids 5 minutes to look through, it’s time to pick the ones that bring you joy.  Consider tossing:

• Sticker sheets with only 1-2 stickers on them (kids never look at those-it’s like the last 2 chips in the box.  No one wants to take them.
• Stickers that have yellowed over time (they probably don’t stick anymore.)
• Stickers that have outdated or old characters on them: No one knows who Woody Woodpecker is.  Monster’s Inc is questionable.

Tidying Craft supplies

Throw out old glue, markers that you don’t remember buying.  You can keep the broken crayons because OT says that they are good for fine motor development/pincer grasp.  Do you have any kits where you completed six of the 8 crafts?  It’s time to toss it.

Organizing Speech Room cards

We love our cards don’t we?  Well it’s time to get rid of them-some of them anyway.  Take all of your cards off of your shelf and pick each one up.  Ask them how many kids that they have helped?  Do you have cards that are not in full color-it’s time to let them go.  If you open the box and start sneezing-that’s a sign that it’s time to move on.

What if you open the box and see pictures like these?

Can you believe I just bought these a few years ago?  I didn’t let these go quite yet-they bring me ironic joy.  My favorite is asking my clients to problem solve the green monster picture.  I’m not even sure what’s happening in that picture.

Tidying Text Books

Are you holding on to your grad school textbooks?  I hoarded mine for about 20 years.  Go ahead and keep your childhood language and maybe a pragmatics book.  Chances are you aren’t going to go back and review that phonetic transcript book or your linguistics book.  If you’ve never worked with a specific age group-it’s time to get rid of the materials.  If you do decide to quit your school job and work in long term care, you shouldn’t be referencing material that is 20 years old anyhow.

Tidying Workbooks

This was hard for me.  Does anyone else remember the Library of Speech Language Pathology? It was an AMAZING book of the month club related just to SLP materials.  I was never organized enough to remember to send in my monthly card-so I ended up with a lot of different books.

Those ones are probably an easy one to start with.  You didn’t want it in the first place.  If it didn’t knock your socks off, it probably won’t in the future.  Take all of you workbooks off of your shelves and only put the ones on that you use.

• The ones that are mildly related-anybody hoard too hard for their kids ESL grammar workbooks?
• Old educational books that you could adapt for therapy but never did.
• Books with old or unclear pictures.  These are not motivating for your clients and if they can’t tell what the picture is-it’s probably NOT going to help them practice their articulation independently.

Tidying Picture books: 

Another difficult one for me.  I love my picture books and have scored a ton.  But I needed to go through and find the ones that are great to use in therapy.

Tidying Paper:

How much paper have you accumulated? I had about five file drawers full.  Here’s how you go through it.  You do not need to keep your blue books from college.  (says the person who kept two PLUS 2 papers she wrote.  I like reading the positive feedback.  Even 20 years later).

College papers:

Toss any notes from grad school unless you graduated in the last five years-or that you referenced in the last five years.  Be honest, you really didn’t know what you were writing about anyhow.  Was that handout mimeographed?  Toss it.

Notes and data sheets: 

Check with your school or clinic.  You need to keep these for longer than you might like.

CE handouts and sheets:

You only need to keep them for a certain amount of time.  This was a hard one for me.  In the book, Marie Kondo suggests that you have already learned what you needed from that CEU course.  If you need to learn more, maybe you need to take the course again.  Harsh.  But I’ve gone through my handouts with a critical eye.  Here is what I’ve thrown out:

• Old/Outdated handouts:  I didn’t keep the handouts from the Jeri Logemann class I went to in grad school.  I am not doing video swallows and if I start, I know that the technology looks incredibly different (I’m hoping) than the fuzzy slides I was looking at 20 years ago.
• Vague PP presentations:  These are the presentations where there are a few key words on each page.  The courses were great-but the handouts and my notes did not strike any memories for me.
• CE certificates:  I failed at this one.  I ended up keeping mine in a folder.  I still enjoy looking through them and seeing what I attended.

I kept typed up notes that are relevant to my current caseload.

What do you do when you are done?

Once you have finished taking items out of your room, you can work on organizing what is left.  I found it was faster to plan for therapy-because I had less materials to think about.  Plus I don’t have that underlying guilty feeling about not making or using some of the dollar spot items I picked up.  Interested in how to organize what’s left?  Come back next week to see how I have organized some of my materials.

Question:  Have you ever tried to tidy up your speech room?  What was easiest for you to get rid of and what was the hardest?  Leave a comment below.