School activities
Between eight and two a school day can change content six or seven times, and every change asks a child to let go of one thing and pick up another. The visual support below lays the parts of the day side by side so the order is easy to see.
♂School activities
A boy stands holding an open book surrounded by symbols of a pencil, a globe, a paint palette and a football.
About this visual support
Learning something new is rarely the hardest part of a school day. The hard part is that a lesson ends in the middle of a thought, that the material has to leave the desk, that the body has to move, and that the next subject starts with completely different rules. Reading asks for stillness, art asks for hands, sport asks for changing clothes and a different noise level. A child who spends a lot of energy on the switches has less left for the content.
A row of pictures covering the day makes those switches visible before they happen. A child knows that art is followed by break, and break by maths, and does not have to ask each time. A tip that suits school activities in particular: sort the pictures by what the body will do, sit still, move, talk, be quiet, rather than only by subject name. That makes it clearer what actually changes at each switch.
The pictures are free to download and work both in the classroom and at the kitchen table at home. If you want the order of the day on a phone, Routined can be tried for fourteen days at no cost, activity by activity.