Run the washing machine
Laundry isn't one task, it's several spread across an afternoon. Load, wait, hang, wait again. For a child the thread between the steps disappears fast. The pictures below hold them together.
♂Wash clothes
A man washing clothes, putting a red t-shirt into a washing machine and holding a laundry basket.
♂Man carrying the laundry basket to the machine
Holding a basket of colourful clothes, a man stands beside an open front loading washing machine with folded towels and a bottle of detergent nearby.
♂Man pouring in detergent
A man tips liquid detergent from a measuring cup into the washing machine while a red t-shirt and socks sit in the drum.
♀Washing machine
A woman loading clothes into a washing machine while holding a box of soap.
♀Hand washing clothes
A woman hand washing clothes in a wash basin.
♀Taking clothes out
A woman taking laundry out of a washing machine.
Wash the clothes
A washing machine full of coloured clothes and detergent, with hands hanging laundry on a line above.
About this visual support
The tricky thing about laundry isn't the steps themselves — it's the gaps between them. Sorting and loading goes quickly, then the drum hums for forty minutes. By the time the child is meant to help hang things up, everything earlier has slipped from their mind, and the link between the dirty pile on the floor and the clean clothes on the rack turns abstract.
That's where visual support comes in. With the cards laid out in the laundry room, the child can walk back and see where in the chain you are, even while the machine does the work alone. You can point to the next picture every time the machine beeps, so the waiting becomes a part of the sequence instead of a leap into nothing.
A concrete tip for laundry specifically: give the detergent cup and the program dial their own cards. Those are the two steps where most goes wrong when children try on their own, and one picture next to the machine is usually enough as a reminder. Once you have a sequence that fits your machine, you can save it in Routined and pull up the exact same routine the next time the basket spills over.
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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