Play in the room
Go and play for a while, you say, and for a child that sentence is either a gift or an empty space depending on whether there is an idea to start from. The visual support below offers a few starting points without taking over the play.
♀Play in the room
A girl sits on the floor in her room playing with a toy car and a teddy bear.
About this visual support
Solo play in your own room comes without a given order. Nobody says what happens first, nobody calls time, and it is entirely up to the child to invent something. Plenty of children love that. Others stand in the middle of the floor, look at the toy car and the teddy bear, and never get past the question of what they are actually supposed to do, so the time feels long rather than free.
Visual support does not have to mean planning the play for them. A handful of cards with different entry points, one for the cars, one for the soft toys, one for building on the rug, works as a menu to choose from when ideas do not arrive on their own. A final card showing what the room looks like afterwards makes the ending understandable too, and the ending is usually the part that stings when an adult interrupts out of nowhere.
Put the cards on the floor rather than the wall and let the child turn one over at a time, like a small draw. The choosing becomes part of the play. In Routined you can gather the room's play options as their own picture set and swap them out as interests move, and you can try the app for fourteen days at no cost.