If you are new to being an SLP in the school setting or have been trying to find an organizational system for managing all your students therapy materials and logs this episode is for you! I will be sharing the pros and cons of making speech therapy folders for your caseload, so that you can figure out if investing the time to make these will be worth it!

Digital Speech Therapy Folders

For SLPs that do teletherapy or want to make less trips to the copier, you need to check out the digital speech therapy folders that use Google Slide templates to help you create a speech folder for sessions. You can see a step-by-step tutorial for how to make a digital speech folder. Check out all the digital speech folders for minimal pairs and different individual sounds.

1. You have a system to find everything you need for the student, including data sheets, worksheets, and visuals that are specific to the student. You have a spot, so keeping things organized is easier.
2. If you want to set up a home program with the family, having a speech folder to send back and forth is easy for updating the family.
3. Students can take ownership of their speech or language therapy practice, and you can have them help with maintaining their speech therapy folder.
4. It helps with revisiting previously taught concepts or using activities from the previous week as a warm-up.

1. It can be time consuming to set up 50+ speech therapy student folders with the individual needs of the students. Having a checklist of things you want to include in all the folders does help such as data sheets, IEP goals, parent contact form, and certain visual supports.
2. Making speech therapy folders for your entire caseload can also be expensive especially if you don’t get any money from your school. For example, if you have a caseload of 60 kids, and get a durable folder, you are looking at spending $60 plus dollars for your caseload.
3. Finding your student’s folder when that group walks in can distract from getting started with the lesson.

1. Instead of using folders for every student, make folders for similar skills or goals. For example, if you have a lot of students with consonant cluster speech sound goals, create a folder with everything you need to target that goal. That way you can pull the activities, visuals and tools out whenever you target that speech therapy goal. I moved towards using a therapy data binder and then having folders for specific groups or skills.
2. Use book holders to keep track of folders by your group times so that you can easily find the folders you need.
3. The folders can get bulky quick with activities and work from the student. It can become a burden to clean out the folders and send things home with the student.
4. Taking data can be tricky because you have to open each students folder to get to their data sheet. A solution to that is to use group data sheets, allot time at the start of the session to take data, so you don’t have to flip back and forth, or implement a progress monitoring approach for updating progress on goals.

Blog posts mentioned about Setting Up Speech Folders:

How to Set Up Your Articulation Speech Folders

SLP Caseload Organization 

Creating Behavior Routines and Expectations

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