Listen to mum
A spoken message exists only in the second it is said. If attention is elsewhere it disappears without trace, and then comes the argument about who said what. The pictures below keep the instruction in the room even after the words have run out.
♀Listen to mum
A girl cups a hand behind her ear listening to an adult talking, with blue sound waves.
♀Listen carefully
A person holds a hand behind their ear and points, with a speech bubble beside them.
About this visual support
Listening is not one ability but several that have to work at once: registering the sound, shifting focus from what you were doing, understanding the words and holding them long enough to act. If one of those steps cannot keep up, the whole message is lost, even when the child both wants to and can do the task.
Visual support works because the picture stays. An instruction in picture form can be looked at again without anyone repeating themselves, and it works even when the room is noisy or several people are talking at once. Fewer situations therefore end in disagreement about what was actually said. The picture also makes the message look the same no matter who in the family gives it.
A concrete tip is to get eye contact first and to say one thing at a time. Two tasks in the same sentence almost always lose half their content. In Routined the day's tasks can sit as pictures to point at, 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.