A Peek Into My Speech Therapy Room

After spending my first three years as an SLP on the road, I was very excited to finally have my own therapy room!  I’ve been in this space (a former principal’s office, which is inside another classroom) for three years now, and I seem to keep tweaking it a bit every year.  To me, if I am going to spend most of my waking hours in a place, it should be somewhere I feel comfortable!  I’ve gone with a general color scheme of greens and blues (my favorite colors), with black accents.

So without further ado, here is my therapy room!

Some challenges I’ve had to work with in this space:

1) 
There is only one phone jack – which is on the opposite wall from the
computer hookups.  It took several times to re-arrange the room to a
configuration that worked, but also kept this constraint in mind. 
2)  It’s very dark, since it’s a room inside another room, with no windows.  I have several lamps that have helped this a bit.
3) 
Being an inside room, the temperature really tends to fluctuate from
very hot to very cold, seemingly from day to day.  (The suckers in my
treasure box actually melted together last week because it was over 80
degrees in there!)  I have a fan when needed, and keep a jacket for when
it gets too cold.
4)  I have too many materials and not enough
storage!  While the shelf at the top of the room extends the length of
two walls, it is very narrow, and just doesn’t have enough room to hold
all of my materials.
5)  Mismatched furniture.  I am pretty sure
that every piece of furniture that I inherited with the room was a
different color!  I moved the filing cabinets away from each other, so
you can’t really tell that they don’t match (which also provides some
great magnetic display space).  I covered the student desk by the door
with an old curtain that matched my color scheme.  I also traded with
another teacher to find student chairs that matched.

My
big project over the summer was to paint my desk and large cabinet
(formerly dinged up and mismatched shades of gray and pink) black – I
was very pleased with the results!  I also switched out the fabric on my
bulletin boards and added the fun paper lanterns.  The bookshelf was
also a new addition – a used furniture store bargain (thanks, Mom!)
painted black to match the other furniture. This has helped out with my storage problem.

The adult chairs and small white metal set of drawers are all from IKEA.  My CCSS “I Can” posters are featured on one bulletin board, while my High Stakes Testing Vocab Builder and Free Inspirational Quote posters are on the others.  I use this great free behavior clip chart from my friend Nicole Allison to keep track of students’ behavior within a session.  The “SLP” letters on the desk were from Michael’s, which I painted green and attached with magnets.