Welcome to the Speech Express!
Welcome to my little labour of love - The Speech Express! My name is Lucy, and I am a middle and high school SLP in Pennsylvania.
Growing up in PA, I spent most of my childhood riding horses, playing the flute, and reading anything I could get my hands on. Poetry, magazines, dictionaries…you name it. If it had words, I was reading it. However, while I loved language, a career in speech pathology was never really something I had my sights set on…in fact, as a kid with a lisp who actively avoided my own SLP for years after dismissal, it was probably the last career I thought I’d choose. (To her credit, she did an amazing job, but having to say, “Sammy snake slithered swiftly across the grass” on repeat for homework every night is forever emblazoned in my mind). But sure enough, as a senior in high school who was torn between her love of anatomy and physiology and the idea of becoming an elementary school teacher, I was swayed to reconsider the field that I had once exiled from my mind.
I attended Penn State in the fall of 2011, switching my major from elementary education to communication sciences and disorders within the first three days. After graduating from Penn State, I began my grad program at West Chester University. After some great experiences with my placements, I had an incredibly tough time deciding which setting to choose for my CFY. I did know two things for sure though: I was either going to work in outpatient rehab or in an elementary school. So, naturally, life threw me a plot twist and I ended up with a contract job as a middle and high school speech therapist.
The next curveball was pitched shortly thereafter, when the previous speech therapist decided to take all of the school’s materials with her when she left. And I mean all of them. I started the first day of my CFY with a few scraps of red paper and a creepy squirrel poster that adorned the wall above my desk. I was terrified. And then, in true broke, recent-grad fashion, I began making resources for my students. We learned together, little by little. I was able to tailor my resources to fit my specific needs (aka an abundance of crazy mixed groups with wildly different goals) and save some money in the process. Plus, working with older students was awesome - they never failed to leave an honest review on any and every activity I created. Now, I am in my 3rd year as a speech language pathologist and I still adore working with older students. My favorite areas to treat are vocabulary, inferencing, and listening comprehension, but I also do much of my therapy with my life skills and autistic support students in the community.
