Pond fish
At a pond almost nothing happens, and then everything happens in a second. The fish appears when it wants to, not when you look, and anyone who moves too much sees none at all. The pictures below make the waiting its own part of the visit.
Pond fish
A pond with grass around the edge where two fish swim, one red and one yellow.
About this visual support
Watching fish is one of the few activities where the reward lies in doing nothing. Movement scares them, noise scares them, and whoever leans in for a better look usually sees the least. That makes the pond an unexpectedly demanding place: the task is to stay still, and stillness is hard when nothing is happening while you are also expecting something to.
Visual support gives the waiting content. A row showing walk up, sit down, look and then feed makes clear that the stillness is the activity itself and not a delay before it. It also gives the feeding a fixed place in the visit, which is usually the part that gets asked about most.
A concrete tip is to give the child something to count: how many times does a fish appear before we go home? Something to keep track of makes sitting still concrete. In Routined the visit to the pond can sit as a short routine with a clear ending, 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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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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