I love shopping online. Way back online shopping started with Amazon, but now we are getting everything online including digital downloadable speech therapy materials. Teacherspayteachers.com is a website that has materials for educators — not only things for teachers — for speech-language pathologists too! It started with a teacher focus, but they have expanded to include speech therapy materials that you can purchase. Materials created by talented speech pathologists from around the country!
Even when you are familiar with shopping online for consumer products, it can be a little scary to purchase something totally unknown from a seller on Teachers Pay Teachers. Just like any online purchase people worry about being scammed, but I’m here to tell you some of the best purchases I’ve made for my tool kit of speech therapy materials have been from teacherspayteachers.com. Here’s five reasons why you should consider taking the plunge and paying for some incredible resources that will change your speech therapy practice forever.
1. Low Cost — The products on Teachers Pay Teachers are reasonably priced. Compared to some of the other options like ordering from catalogs and paying shipping, Teachers Pay Teachers products are affordable. I used to buy speech therapy books for $39.95, but now I can get the same great stuff for between $5-$10 on TpT. It makes it low risk to try out a resource. Why are the resources affordable? Part of the reason is that the author doesn’t have to pay for printing and binding of books. However, you will need to have access to a printer to use most products (unless you buy a “no print” which is mean to use on an iPad or computer).
2. Digital Downloads — We carry laptops and speech therapy materials all over the place these days and it can weigh us down. Now is the time to shift to digital downloads that you can conveniently buy from any device and use immediately. It makes your life a little bit easier and a little less heavy when you are traveling from building to building!
3. Updates Forever — Many companies come out with the new additions of their products every year, but it doesn’t matter if you already own the previous edition, you have to pay for the new edition, even it was just minor edits! Teachers Pay Teachers independent authors constantly fine-tune, tweak, and update their products as they gain more experience in the classroom using the product and more experience in the classroom in general. You can log into your account, click on “My Purchases” and when you scroll down, look for “Newly Updated – Download for Free!” This is a huge benefit of TpT.
4. Free Resources -Speech paths and teachers work hard to offer free resources to people who are dedicated shoppers. Free resources are a way for a seller to showcase their talents and help you out by giving you things you can potentially use for short amount of time. Sometimes free resources are offered as samples of larger products that they have available for sale. Why not reward a seller who offers excellent freebies with a couple sales for some of their full products? Teachers Pay Teachers authors are working to create these free resources for you to use — Some large companies don’t offer free resources to you! One thing you should know: most sellers don’t offer their best stuff for free due to the amount of time and cost of materials to create (Adobe Suite, commercial fonts and clip art). If you work hard on a valuable resource you do want to sell it, because you’re using your time to create something that is useful.
5. Social Media Relationship — All of the Teachers Pay Teachers sellers that are serious about their businesses have a social media presence. It’s really wonderful to be able to connect with the seller on their blog or social media accounts (like Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest). You can get a real feel for a speech pathologist’s approach to speech therapy by checking out their social media accounts. And you can build a relationship with that person virtually — that’s something you can’t do with corporations that are offering speech therapy materials.
BONUS REASON: Practice Makes Perfect — Teachers Pay Teachers authors get better at creating resources the longer they create. The resources I made two years ago are not as sophisticated as what I make today. But, since I continually revise, those old resources eventually are brought up to speed. If you aren’t perfectly happy with something, check back with the seller and you might be happier later as the author’s skills improve.
Once you find Teachers Pay Teachers authors that you really like and trust, you feel really good about sending them money for the products that they create because you want to compensate them. I hope that I helped you think about and consider shopping on Teachers Pay Teachers. My store is Sarah Wu – Speech is Beautiful and I’m constantly adding to it and revising older products
About using receipts in therapy: I could also see using receipts for teaching critical thinking and phonemic skills. Because receipts often abbreviate words or leave out the vowels, clients/students could try to analyze what the listed items might be. Woo hoo! Starting my school year with a new phonemic awareness activity! Older language impaired students often struggle to identify key info in texts, and have difficulty taking notes without just re-writing entire sentences. Receipts can be one model of “shorthand”. I’m at the elementary level now, but wish I were still working with upper grades and adults, just to try that!