Visual Support: Daily Schedule

-- by Sarah, Gaby's mom

Gaby used a daily schedule with both words and icons throughout high school. It included the written name of the class, room number, teacher's name, hour or time and an icon to represent the subject matter. This allowed Gaby to preserve her independence and dignity (no one likes to be nagged by authority figures - especially not mom) and also encouraged her to continue to develop her organization and time management skills. It also allowed us to signal/prepare her for important changes to her day. For example:

• when she was going to have a substitute
• when an assembly was scheduled
• when a fire or tornado drill was coming
• when the usual order of her day was going to change due to special activities at school or testing
• when she had a doctor/dentist appointment and had to leave early
• etc.

Transitions are typically very difficult for people with autism and so are changes to routine. Knowing in advance when these things were happening and having a stable, visual reminder greatly reduced Gaby's anxiety and helped her successfully adapt to these kinds of events.

The schedule helped with social interactions, as well. Gaby typically doesn't pay much attention to new people. Seeing the classroom teacher's name written down on her schedule ever day helped her remember it and use it when addressing her teacher.

Gaby was almost the only student in her autism homeroom in high school who still had a visual schedule like this. Interestingly, most of the kids in that room knew Gaby's schedule by heart - even when they couldn't remember their own.

Grade School Schedule

I no longer have Gaby's grade school schedule, but I made an example of a velcro schedule that could possibly be used at school or in a home school setting.

Gaby, however, used a pocket schedule in grade school based on the TEACCH system. We glued the activity icons onto index cards which were placed in order for the day onto a tag board sheet that had rows of library pockets (I don't have any of these left - Gaby's actual schedule was much larger than the example I made). This system is just as flexible as Gaby's high school system - since her cards were laminated, I suppose we could have written notes on them as well, although we didn't.

The beauty of this system was that it both indicated what came next in the schedule and acted as a prompt to physically move Gaby around the room and the building. Pockets with corresponding icons were placed around the school at the doorways of specific classrooms or even on tables or at centers within Gaby's homeroom. Gaby took each schedule card in turn off her personal schedule and then walked with it to the appropriate classroom or area, placed the card in the matching pocket and then entered her class.

The Trip Clip® Activities

These Activities offer solutions to create your own Daily Schedule Visual Support

School Schedule

Daily Checklist