Lunch and dinner
Leaving something fun halfway through, sitting down at the table and then staying there until everyone has finished are two demands arriving at once. The steps below make both of them visible before the food is even served.
Lunch meal and dinner meal
On the left a sandwich with milk and an apple, on the right a plate of chicken, mashed potato and peas.
About this visual support
The hard part of lunch and dinner is rarely the food. It is being pulled away from something better, and then being expected to stay seated for an unclear amount of time while others are still eating. Without a visible end point, every minute at the table turns into a negotiation.
A visual schedule gives the meal a start and a finish: set the table, sit down, eat, ask to leave. The table stops being a trap and becomes a stretch with four fixed markers. One tip that usually helps more than commenting on the plate is to add a warning picture before the meal, the one that means play pauses in five minutes, so the interruption does not arrive out of nowhere in the middle of a game.
Routined lets you put the steps of the meal together with a timer, so both the warning and the time at the table become something your child can see rather than hear.
Use this image in a schedule
Build your own visual schedule with this image and download it as a print-ready PDF. Completely free.
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Take the visual supports with you
In Routined you build schedules from these pictures, add timers and voice instructions, and your child follows the day on their own.
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