Hair tie
Tying up your hair is fine motor work carried out without seeing what you are doing. The hand has to hold, the tie has to twist and the result has to sit just tight enough, all behind your head. The pictures below show the steps in order, so it can be practised calmly.
Hair tie
A purple hair tie.
About this visual support
What makes this hard is that sight cannot help. The fingers have to know how much hair they are holding, how many turns the tie needs and how tight it will end up once the grip lets go, without the eyes checking any of it. It is also one of the few steps where a small mistake is felt all day, because a tie in the wrong place pulls at the temple.
Visual support makes the grips possible to train separately. One picture for gathering the hair, one for twisting the tie and one for pulling it through means each part can be repeated on its own. Many children learn faster from pictures than from instructions, because the words for these movements are hard to formulate.
A concrete tip is to practise in front of a mirror first, then with two mirrors and finally without. The transition is gentler when the body already knows the movement. In Routined the hair step can sit inside the morning routine, 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.
More similar visual supports
Put up your hair
A girl reaches up with both hands and ties her hair into a bun.
Braid your hair
Smiling person with a braid in their hair
Help with hair
An adult hand brushes the hair of a seated girl with a green brush.
Blow-dry hair
Person blow-drying their hair with a hairdryer
Body and hair
A boy in a blue T-shirt points one hand at his hair and the other at his body.
Braid hair
Two hands braid the hair of a smiling girl wearing a pink shirt.
Brush hair and apply sunscreen
A girl brushes her long hair while holding an SPF spray.
Brush Teeth and Hair
A girl brushes her teeth while holding a comb to her hair.
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.