Play with the teddy
A teddy is rarely just a soft toy. It comes along to new places, it hears things that are not said to adults, and in play the events of the day are acted out once more. The pictures below make it easy to give that role a place.
♂Play with the teddy
A boy holds and hugs a brown teddy bear.
♂Play with the teddy
A boy sits cross-legged hugging a teddy bear with building blocks around.
About this visual support
The soft toy does two things at once. It is something to hold when the surroundings are new or unfamiliar, and it is a character to act things out with when something has been hard to understand. A child who has had a difficult day rarely reports it directly, but they can let the teddy be the one who got sad, and the story comes out anyway.
Visual support helps with both functions. Pictures of the teddy in different situations make it easier to bring up what happened without asking outright, and a picture of where the teddy lives means it is found when it is needed most, which is usually just before bedtime.
A concrete tip is to let the teddy go through the routine first. Brushing the teddy's teeth before your own makes the step familiar and removes some of the resistance. In Routined the soft toy can appear as its own picture in the evening 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
Stuffed animal
A brown cartoon teddy bear sits front-facing with a smile.
Active play
A girl jumps with a basketball in a playground with a slide and swings.
Activities
A child surrounded by icons for a book, paint palette, ball and building block.
Activity
Inside a dashed circle a girl runs along holding a paintbrush in one hand and a ...
After school club
A symbolic image of an after school club with three people, a clock, a book, a s...
After school friends
Two boys and a girl, all smiling, one boy holding a soccer ball, in front of a s...
Afternoon playtime
A happy girl runs and plays with a ball outdoors in front of a playground.
Beach
A beach with an umbrella, beach ball and flip-flops by blue sea and sun.
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.