Visual Supports: An Easy Way to Teach Your Child Independence
One of the most common strategies we use in special education is visual supports. And there’s a reason for that -they are super effective!
Visual supports are common in everyday life. They’re words or pictures that help us understand how to navigate the world around us.
In the classroom, visual supports are viewed as an accommodation. There can be labels on desks, a visual example of a math concept, or a diagram in a science class.
Most often, we write it into IEPs as “visual support for verbal information” (or something along those lines) because most people learn best when information is presented in a variety of ways. By giving our students the information visually and verbally, we’re helping them make connections and understand the content better.
Visual supports are beneficial for all of us. We use them constantly without even realizing that we’re being supported!
Some examples you see every day include the labels on trash and recycle bins, exit signs, road signs, labels on food, and the labels on your remote’s buttons. We use these visual supports all the time, but we don’t actually recognize that we’re using an accommodation to navigate our days.
For toddlers and young children, visual supports can be a great way to build independence. You can put helpful pictures around your house to help them learn routines.
One helpful use of visuals is to label your child’s playroom with pictures and words to help them learn where specific toys go. This is a fantastic way to enable your child to clean up their playroom on their own.
Another option is to make a checklist pairing words with pictures to guide their children through their morning routines. You could also have a visual checklist to help your child get dressed in the morning.
Today, I’m going to show you how to make a visual strip to teach your child how to complete a specific task. It’s so easy to do, and it will definitely make your life (and theirs!) so much easier!
Follow the steps below to easily create visuals for your child:
1. Start by listing out the necessary steps in simple, concrete language
For this post, I’m going to make a visual checklist to help Rae wash her hands independently. It’s funny, when you start to break things down into steps, you realize how complex our everyday tasks actually are. For handwashing, I would list out 7 steps:
- Turn on the water
- Rinse your hands
- Get soap
- Rub your hands together
- Rinse the soap off your hands
- Turn off the water
- Dry your hands
When you’re breaking your tasks into steps, be sure to keep your wording simple. Stick to only one step at a time. Merging steps (e.g., Get soap and rub your hands together) complicates the task and may cause your child to get overwhelmed or confused.
Even if you feel like you’re wording things too simply, you can always supplement the instructions with your own demonstration and hands-on help. The visual support is a great reminder, but it’s no substitute for the hands-on, comprehensive teaching you use when your child needs to learn something new.
2. Pick a template
I love making and choosing templates for visual supports. Finding the right one makes your work so much more effective! It’s the same way I feel about choosing my teacher planner every year (I love the layout where the days are vertical, and Plum Paper‘s custom planners are the best!).
When I make visual supports for tasks, I like to make a chart with 3 parts -the number of the step, a picture of the task or item necessary to complete the step, and a short description of the task in words.
For simple tasks like handwashing, I like to use a horizontal strip. To me, it makes more sense to use a vertical strip for checklists. You can choose either template based on what works best for you or your child.
3. Use real photos whenever possible
One way to get your child to buy into visual supports is to get them involved in making them. Similar to the my quick guide to social narratives, you can use photographs of your child to make visual supports more exciting and personal.
For my visual strip, I took pictures of Rae doing each step of the handwashing process. At this point, she still needs help using the soap dispenser, but as she gets a little older, she’ll be able to look at the picture to remind herself.
Also, even though there is no WAY I’m trusting Rae to turn a faucet on by herself, I’m still including it in the checklist because it’s part of the task. These strips are all about helping your child understand the steps. Even if they can’t do it themselves, they can still understand the full sequence necessary to complete the task.
4. Laminate!
Any visual support you’ll be using more than once should be laminated to save you the hassle of printing it over and over again. At school, we can laminate things, but most of us don’t have laminators at home, so you may need to get a little creative.
A plastic sheet protector is perfect for full-page visual supports. For smaller items, you can actually use packing tape! Cover the item completely front and back, and leave some overlap around the edges.
Laminating (or in my case, wrapping in packing tape) is helpful for many reasons. First, it is basically indestructible, which is always important for young children. It’s waterproof, spill proof, and can’t be ripped up.
If you laminate a visual checklist, you can keep a dry erase marker nearby and guide your child through checking off each step as they go. The marker will wipe right off when you’re done, and you can reuse the checklist as long as your child needs it.
Here are the steps I used to create my visual template for handwashing. I enlisted my husband to take pictures while Rae and I worked together to wash her hands.
To start, I created a new Google Doc and inserted a table with 7 columns and 3 rows. Then, I numbered the top row 1 to 7.
Next, I wrote the steps into the bottom row of the chart.
Finally, I uploaded the photos from my computer. I was happy to see that Google Docs automatically resized them to fit perfectly within the chart.
At some point soon, I plan to print out the final version, “laminate” it with packing tape, and hang it above my bathroom sink! But naturally, we’re out of ink in our printer, so I’ll have to come back and update this post later to show the finished product.
I hope this tutorial is helpful! As your child gets older, you can always fade these supports or make them more complex. And remember, they’re not just for kids! Using visual supports like labels around your house can make it much easier to keep things organized!
What will you make visual supports for? Are there any templates that would help you? Please let me know in the comments below!