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| A view of downtown Houston from our hotel |
Thanks to the wonderful Jen over at Speech Universe for her kind words about our Fortunately Fans book unit. You can find more book companions from Jen here.
Thanks to the fabulous Jenna from Speech Room News for starting up her Speech Spotlight again - and for selecting us! Luckily, I was in the middle of watching an exciting baseball game when I got the news, so my screaming didn't stand out!
And thanks to TpT for including us on their list of librarians! Amy is a librarian at a Pk-2 public school.
Next up is TSHA! Amy, Lisa and I met up Wednesday night in Houston. TSHA has about 5,000 attendees and 100+ exhibitors. This year's theme was "Remembering the Past... Embracing the Future." Unfortunately, the CE system was down so we went back to recording CEUs on NCR paper, so that was the "past" part. But TSHA has promised to unveil a new, improved website this summer! I am very excited about it!
With Embracing the Future, TSHA introduced an app just for convention. And instead of filling out paper forms for booths, we had bar codes on our name tags that were scanned.
On Thursday morning, I headed over to registration and saw a few of my co-worker friends. This year (maybe previously, but the first time I've done it), TSHA started out with 8 a.m. workshops, the exhibitor hall opening at 9 a.m., and the keynote speaker from 10-12. I really liked that system better because when we had keynote from 8-10, there was a mad dash with several thousand SLPs to get the goodies at the exhibit hall. And the workshops were also more scattered around lunchtime, so not everyone was in line at the same time.
At about 8:30 a.m., we headed to the exhibits hall and filled in some holes where people were waiting for the booths to open. It was like rope drop at Disney, or waiting for a store to open for Black Friday. Our game plan - like many others - was to hit up the Super Duper booth for bags and then Pediastaff for toobaloos and headsets. Here are some highlights from the exhibits:
Meeting Pediastaff:
My friends didn't want to go see Brene Brown - can you believe it? - but I headed that way around 9:30. It was then that Amy texted me she had a headache, and I started stressing about our presentation at 1:30.
As soon as keynote was over, I walked all the way across the skywalk to the hotel to help Amy (who was feeling better) and Lisa carry things over for our presentation. The lunch cafe line was moving too slowly for me, the firstborn, but Amy and Lisa, the baby club, assured me we would make it.
At 1:31 p.m., I was about to tell Amy to start our presentation when the nice TSHA volunteer entered the back of the room, held up the "Session Closed" sign, and signaled for us to start. Wow! We were so humbled to be able to share with about 250 people! Luckily, that thought didn't hit me till afterwards. Our presentation was Speech & Language with a Twist of Literacy, and our slides are here.
The rest of TSHA was easy after that. I was able to relax, hit some great sessions, and even meet a couple of SLP FB friends in person!
And now I just have to make it 5 days to Spring Break!
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