Stop the burnout with work by using these 5 steps for creating easy lesson plans for preschool speech therapy. Not only can you take back your time and decrease your stress, but you can also provide engaging lessons for your preschool speech therapy students by incorporating these steps into your planning.
5 years ago, I was burned out! With my caseload constantly expanding, I had less and less time for planning and felt overwhelmed. (Can you relate?) I dreaded coming to work each day because I felt like I was failing all of my students when it came to planning their therapy.
Something needed to change! If I wanted to continue my career, I had to work smarter not harder. I employed the following 5 strategies when creating my lesson plans, which eventually turned into an efficient system for planning my whole year. My stress slowly started to decrease and more importantly, I started to enjoy my job again.
You can use these same 5 steps to create your lesson plans.
Step 1: Change your mindset.
How did I begin to combat my burnout? I started by changing my mindset about my lesson plans. I spent the first 10 years of my career believing that my lessons needed to be perfect. In order to be the best SLP, I felt like I had to have different activities for each student. 
After some reflection, I realized I had put unrealistic expectations upon myself, which was causing much of my stress. I decided enough was enough! I would have one lesson plan each week, with the same activities, that could be differentiated for all of the preschool speech therapy students on my caseload.
Step 2: Use weekly themes as a foundation for planning.
After I realized that being a perfectionist with my planning was causing too much stress, I decided I would choose a theme each week and find activities to fit my themes.
I no longer felt like I was pulling random things out of my speech closet each week. I was able to have new activities for each theme, which increased engagement with all of my students. And since therapy was planned around themes, there were commonalities in vocabulary between all the weekly activities.
Step 3: Decrease the number of activities and become good at differentiating.
I chose 4-to 5 activities per week for each of my themes. All of my students could participate because I could address multiple goals with the same activities. I differentiated based on 4 main categories of skills: prelinguistic skills, receptive language, expressive language, and speech sounds.
Step 4: Create a lesson plan template to save time.
In order to increase my efficiency with planning, I created a lesson plan template that could be used for each theme.
I printed one copy weekly for each student on my caseload and used it as a visual schedule for students during sessions. It was also the perfect place to take notes.
Step 5: Keep track of your themes on a master document.
As I went through the year, I kept track of my themes on one master lesson planning document.
All I had to do was look at the master document each week to see what the theme was and print the corresponding lesson plan.
I used these 5 strategies to help decrease burnout in the area of making lesson plans for preschool. In the process, I reduced my anxiety about planning and increased the time I needed for other things.
It is my mission to add value to your busy life. I believe I can do this by sharing my preschool speech therapy lesson plans with you.
This article is the first in a series of posts to help you plan therapy one lesson at a time using an efficient lesson planning system. It’s not a system that works for everyone, but as long as I can help one overwhelmed SLP, I’ve served my purpose.
Download the FREE lesson plan template master document to get started. Then, watch for my next post in this series and we’ll add to this document together. (This FREE download is part of my Itinerant Clinician Starter Kit, which is featured in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.)
Click here to get your FREE preschool farm-themed lesson plan. When you sign up for this FREEBIE, you will automatically get updates when I create a new lesson plan!
