Start school

#school start#school#backpack#school bus#first day

Starting school replaces almost everything at once: rooms, adults, rules and an order of the day nobody has explained yet. The pictures below let you walk through the day in advance, calmly and at home.

A happy boy wearing a backpack is surrounded by a book, a school bus, a pencil and a school building.

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Boy starting school

A happy boy wearing a backpack is surrounded by a book, a school bus, a pencil and a school building.

A laughing boy with a backpack carries a stack of books with a red apple, between a red house and a yellow school bus, with an arrow pointing forward.

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Boy with books on his way to school

A laughing boy with a backpack carries a stack of books with a red apple, between a red house and a yellow school bus, with an arrow pointing forward.

A laughing boy with a yellow backpack carries a blue book and a red apple past a small brick building, with an open book and a graduation cap above.

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Boy walking past school with a book and an apple

A laughing boy with a yellow backpack carries a blue book and a red apple past a small brick building, with an open book and a graduation cap above.

A smiling child with a yellow backpack holds books and a red apple, with a yellow arrow pointing at a red school building and a yellow school bus.

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Child with books by the school and bus

A smiling child with a yellow backpack holds books and a red apple, with a yellow arrow pointing at a red school building and a yellow school bus.

About this visual support

What makes starting school unusual is how much changes at the same moment. New adults, new rooms, new rules and an order to the day the child has no knowledge of yet. Even a child who is looking forward to it has nothing to compare against, and the questions tend to arrive at bedtime rather than at the kitchen table.

Visual support lets that unknown day be walked through before it happens. With pictures of the backpack, the journey, the classroom, break time and the way home, the abstract turns into a sequence you can look at several days running. Children who need more preparation than others for big transitions, among them many autistic children, get something concrete to hold on to during the first weeks.

Go there in advance if you can and photograph the entrance, the schoolyard and the classroom door. Your own pictures of that particular school make the preparation more real than a generic image of any school. If you want the whole school morning as a sequence on your phone, you can build it in Routined and try it for fourteen days at no cost.