Visual Support: Weekly/Monthly Calendar

-- by Sarah, Gaby's mom

For longer range planning, a weekly or monthly calendar was very helpful. It helped Gaby mentally prepare for things like inservice days or vacation days (even good changes to routine - like a day off school - can be stressful), band concerts or special events. It also allowed me to have a visual reminder of after school activities, like clarinet lessons, skating lessons, sports activities and library volunteer work. For the preferred activities, this prevented her from nagging me endlessly about entertaining her, and for the non-preferred activities, the advanced warning helped increase her compliance.

I saw an extreme example of the benefit of this kind of visual support with another student at Gaby's high school. She was largely non-verbal and tended to be non-compliant as well. She also loved to swim, and our high school has an indoor pool. The classroom teacher had arranged for his students to have some pool time when the usual PE classes weren't going to need it, but the times they could get weren't very consistent. This particular student, in joyous anticipation, started escaping the classroom and running down to the pool and/or started disrobing in the classroom apparently to encourage the teacher to get her bathing suit out and take her down to the pool. When she was told that it wasn't a swimming day a huge tantrum would ensue. However, a social story that explained the appropriate steps of the swimming routine (walk down to PE locker room, take clothes off, place in locker, put swimsuit on, walk to pool, etc.) and included a calendar that clearly showed which days were swimming days almost entirely eliminated the problem.

Susan's Swimming Social Story