Episode 2: Visuals & Autism – 3 Tips To Take Action

Hey everybody. This is Tara and you're listening to the Autism Little Learners Podcast. This week we're going to be diving into visuals and autism. We will be chatting about why we use visuals at school and at home. Plus, I'll show you where you can download some free visual supports to get started. Thanks for joining me. See you inside the show. Hi, I'm Tara, and this is The Autism Little Learners Podcast. I am a speech language pathologist with a twist. I've run my own communication-based classroom for over two decades, and I'm so excited to share actionable tips and strategies for supporting young autistic children. My goal is to help you feel more confident and successful when teaching your autistic child or students at the early childhood level. If you are ready to learn some tried and true strategies that really work, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. You are gonna laugh when you hear what my first visual schedule is looked like. Picture this, you're doing your student teaching in 1997 and the internet really isn't a thing yet, so you need to get creative and make your own pictures for visuals. Enter Polaroid pictures. Yep, I said it. That's what we used for visual schedules in the 1990s. You put a little velcer on the back and you're ready to go. We sure have come a long way since then, and when it comes to visuals and autism, we have so many more options now, but even back then, we knew that visual supports helped. Visual supports are now an evidence-based practice, which means they've been proven to work. You might hear autistic individuals described as visual learners. I'm doing air quotes. This is true for the most part for autistic students and children. Educators and parents are told use visuals and then they're thrown down the rabbit hole that I like to call Google. There are so many options for visual supports that you can get caught up in some pretty major overwhelm. How do you know which visual supports will work best for your child or students? Does this visual support have a proven track record? Meaning do we know that it works? My hope is that I can help you solve this problem so you can make a decision and get positive results. If you haven't downloaded my free visual support starter set, I want you to do that A S A P. There's a link to the starter set in the show notes in this podcast episode. In there, you're gonna find several tried and true visuals that I like to start with. They are the basis for my classroom and they work in both the classroom and at home. Let's start by talking about one of the visual supports in the starter set. We call it the all done bucket, and when I started working at the early childhood level a decade ago, the special education teacher that I co-taught with her name's Terry, she was already using the strategy and we adoringly like to call it a miracle tool. That's because we've seen it work like a miracle over and over again. Talk about a proven track record in all. Dumb bucket is basically a visual with the symbol on it indicating all done. Now, the magic is not in the symbol itself, but it's in the predictable routine that you teach. Let me say that again. It doesn't matter if you have a picture of the universal no sign, a flower or even a smiley face. It's more about the consistent, predictable routine that you create Using this visual support. When the all done bucket is implemented in my classroom, we set a digital timer for two minutes and say two minutes, then all done, and you can be more specific and say two minutes. Then all done Play-Doh at the same time. You can bring the bucket, the all done bucket near the child so that they can see it, and then when there's a minute left on the timer, try to give another reminder one minute. Then all done Play-Doh. When the timer beeps, I repeat all done Play-Doh and then sing a cleanup song for me. It goes like this, clean up, clean up everybody everywhere you know the song. This song adds another level of predictability to this routine. At first, I can help my student put the Play-Doh in the all dumb bucket and then remove the bucket from the area. If they're sad about it, we work through it together. Sometimes it can be nice to have a transition object to redirect their attention to that might be a fidget toy or some other small toy like a matchbox car or a figurine that they can hold onto while they transition. The awesome thing about an all done bucket is that the more it's used consistently by all staff members, the more quickly it becomes routine for the child. Eventually, giving up an item when it's time to be done won't be stressful and it will become automatic. I had a student last year who loved holding onto little animal figurines. It was okay to hold a few throughout the day. In fact, it helped reduce his anxiety and increased his cooperation, but at the end of the day, he had a hard time giving them up. When it was time to go to the bus, he would hold the toys tighter, cry and even run away. Once the all done bucket was consistently implemented and he understood it, he started putting the figurines in the bucket as soon as the timer beeped with no reminders and no help. Can you imagine if this could work for your students or child game changer? Right? That's why we call it the Miracle tool. I think it's worth a try, don't you. Here's your action plan. Download the free visual support starter set and choose one visual strategy that you want to implement. I have three tips for you when you are ready to start using the new strategy. Number one, start small. Choose one strategy at a time so that you and the child and your support staff are not overwhelmed. We're gonna take baby steps and implement one thing at a time, and so if this is the all done bucket, that's the one thing we start with and we don't worry about the rest. Number two, be consistent. Have a brief meeting with your team and talk about the strategy and exactly how you'll be using it. How much time are you gonna put on the timer? What words will you use when the child is learning? What happens if the child is upset at first? How are we gonna respond? These are all things that you should chat about ahead of time in order to provide that consistency. The more consistent your team is, the more predictable the routine is and the faster the child will learn the new strategy. Number three, give it enough time. One of my pet peeves is when a new strategy is tried once or maybe twice and then someone says, we tried that it didn't work so many times. It can take several weeks of implementing a new strategy before it shows signs of working. Think about how long it takes any of us to form a new habit. I would give a new strategy at least six weeks being implemented consistently, not just here and there before talking about whether or not it's working. Now, I want you to DM me on Instagram or Facebook at autism little learners and let me know which new visual strategy you are going to try. First, I wanna hear your successes. I wanna hear your questions, so please reach out and I hope you will join me for a brand new episode on Tuesday of next week. Bye-bye for now. I'm sending a big virtual hug your way because you just finished another episode of the Autism Little Learners Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. If you have had success with any of the strategies that you learned about in this podcast, I would love to hear from you. Send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook at autism little learners. Don't forget to grab your free visual support starter set by going to autism little learners.com/visuals, and always remember to find the good in every day.