Change

About this visual support

The hard part of a change is rarely the change itself. It is that the child has already done the work of preparing, built an internal order for the day, and that order is torn down by a sentence that takes two seconds to say. A substitute teacher, a cancelled training session, a trip moved to next week: the information is small, but it lands on something that was already finished. For autistic children this is often where the day comes apart, not in the activity that replaced the old one.

A change symbol works best when it is already in place before it is needed. Once a child knows there is a picture for exactly this, the disruption becomes a category rather than chaos, something that has happened before and has a name. Put the new picture next to the old one in the schedule instead of removing the old one straight away. That way the child can see what was swapped for what, and does not have to guess whether the rest of the day changed too.

In Routined you can swap a single step in the day plan and let the child see the new order immediately, and the app can be tried for fourteen days at no cost.