Wednesday Comes Around Again...Like it is Apt to Do

Well, it is Wednesday again, and I am getting myself ready to go to work for a day full of therapy groups. I am still walking gingerly with a pulled muscle in my side that complicates every move I make. Coughing makes it worse, so every time my asthma comes out to play, so does this pulled muscle. This is my asthma season, so you can imagine. Enough of that, though, it is Wednesday.

My focus for today is always just to get through it all.

For some reason, my schedule is overly full of sessions on Wednesdays and not on Thursdays or Fridays, I would love that to change, but it is not likely at the moment. This is the one day where I don't have many individuals and the two that I am supposed to have today did not do well in music therapy yesterday, so I am not going to reward them for their inappropriate engagement in group by giving them more time to do whatever they want. So, that time will be spent explaining to these clients why they don't get to go to music therapy. I will write them notes about responsibility and safety expectations for music therapy group in order to earn music therapy small group time because I do not want to be reinforcing the negative behaviors. It is tricky because denial of special privileges due to lack of responsibility of the clients can lead to more behaviors of concern, but I am not in a place where I can manage these behaviors safely.

After work, I will head to my second job. I think that part of my Wednesday blues comes from the fact that it is a very long day. I start off by leaving my home before dawn, doing more groups than any other day in my week, heading to meetings that have little to nothing to do with my work, and then driving 90 minutes to get to my second job. By the time I get to the second work location, I am exhausted. Fortunately, I have plans for the next three weeks, so I can focus on things for the Lenten season tonight. After I start making plans for Lent, I can try to relax a bit before rehearsal starts. I'm down one soprano this week. That means I get to be the soprano. Eesh. It's going to be a long day.

I delivered some projects to classrooms yesterday which meant getting some things out of my space and into the space of others. I am still working on more things to hand over, but at least I got the first batch out to students. I then found some of the things that I had asked to be laminated hung up on the walls without being laminated in places that were not appropriate. I had to take them down because that was not the plan for those resources. I will send them back and ask for them to be laminated and returned to me. In the meantime, I am also putting together binders and file folder activities for other classrooms. They are getting either binder pages or file folders, but the folders are not with me - they are with the same people who messed up the big laminating projects that I had sent up. So, I am not entirely sure that they will be done the way I need them finished. That adds a bit of suspense to an otherwise boring life, doesn't it?

The things that I am working on now are part of a bigger file from Teachers Pay Teachers - unfortunately, I do not have the title of these files with me, so I cannot tell you what I am doing, but I have been working on monthly sensory box activity sheets. The original poster intended on including these pieces in sensory boxes. The students would then sort through the sensory materials to complete the pages. I am not in charge of setting up sensory boxes, so I am just making the pages and pieces. I made two copies of everything, so each class will get different things for each month.

My dream is that, eventually, these pages will go into a resource library of sorts. Of course, that would mean that the teachers who have these things would have to share, but that doesn't happen much in our school. For now, I am just giving things to each classroom so everyone has something to do. I started with the errorless files and am now moving into the matching files. The last ones to be done will be the CVC words and the rhyming sheets. We don't have many students who are working on those types of goals, so I will leave those for the last bits. I may even keep the rhyming words and folders for my clinic area since I am donating all the Velcro for this project.

I enjoy making things, and I have the time right now. I will have less time in about two weeks when I am internless, but I will still have time that I can devote to making things for my students to use in different places. I am working my way through four months' worth of materials and resources right now and will be copying other months as I get to the end of each quarter. I figure that the matching and errorless files are the most important for the majority of the students who are using these materials, so those are my primary focus, but I do enjoy making the other ones as well. I hope that the teachers that I am giving these to know how to use them, but that is not my part of the situation. I am just making things in the background.

Well, it is time to head out into the world. I have to get gas for my car, some breakfast for me, and then head down south for work. Let's hope for a smooth day here and in other places as well...