Order food and drink
Ordering is rarely about the food. It is about choosing quickly from a long menu, speaking to an adult you do not know, and being heard over the noise, and the steps below break that exact moment apart.
♂Ordering food on a screen
A man holds up a tablet showing a shopping cart and points at a tray with a burger, fries and a drink.
About this visual support
Three hard things arrive at once at the counter: a menu with more lines than anyone can scan, a stranger waiting for an answer, and a room loud enough that the voice has to be louder than usual. Plenty of children solve it by nudging a parent and letting someone else speak.
Visual support moves two of those three difficulties back to the kitchen table. You look at the pictures before you leave, the child chooses without a queue behind them, and by the time you are standing there the decision is already made. What is left is one sentence, and even that can be rehearsed with the picture in front of you.
One practical tip is to agree on a backup choice in advance. If the dish has run out or looks different from the picture, the child already knows what number two is, and the disappointment does not have to stall the queue. The whole order can also live as a small routine in Routined, with pictures and your own photos from the place you usually go, and the app can be tried for fourteen days at no cost.
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.
* 14-day free trial included for new users.