How to help your child with daily routines

by Joanne · Published November 23, 2014 · Updated January 20, 2015

How to help your child with daily routines

From the time you open your eyes in the morning you commence running through your daily routine. Most morning routines consist of waking up, going to the toilet, putting the kettle on, preparing and eating breakfast, getting dressed for work or the day. A lot happens in a short time. Have you ever noticed that as soon as you’re on a time frame the kids become noncompliant……..all this transitioning in such a short time frame is too much for them to cope with.

A morning visual schedule is a way to help with this. We have used one of these for many years not only for the morning routine, we had one for school holidays, night time and weekends. They are great for setting out visually the routine you want to follow which is most helpful when kids are too young to read. They also provide children with a step by step guide as to the sequence of events that will happen and avoid any confusion of what exactly you want them to do and in what order. I found my kids were calmer and less resistant when we used a visual schedule for our morning routine.

Picto-Selector is a visual schedule creator that you can download to your computer for FREE. It is very user friendly and there are thousands of pictures in the library. There is also the ability to upload and use your own photos. To make a reusable visual schedule you will need the following:

Items:

laminator and laminating pouches (makes them last longer if you laminate but you could contact if you don’t have a laminator)

paper

printer

computer with Picto-Selector installed on it

scissors

sticky velcro dots (I found these cheapest at Flash Harry’s)

plan of what your daily routine will look like

Method:

Have a rough plan of the steps the child will need to complete in the routine, with ideas of how you could visually represent this. Picto-Selector has a search facility so you can enter in what you are looking for and it will bring all related pictures up.

Once you have all the pictures loaded into your schedule you are ready to print it out. I usually leave a space next to each step so that the child can mark when the step is completed. My children each had different markers, my daughter used smiley faces and my son used various pictures of construction vehicles (more on how you make these later).

Once you have printed out your routine you need to laminate it. Once laminated you place sticky velcro dots in the marking area. Your schedule is now ready to use you just need some markers. You could leave this bit out and just use a felt pen and place a mark next to each step as it’s done but my kids loved having personal markers. Markers can be anything that your kids love. To make these go back into Picto-Selector and choose a marker and print out as many of them as there are steps. Print them out, laminate them and place a sticky dot on the back and you are done.

Because we used this visual format so much in our house for lots of different routines I ended up printing out lots of useful pictures, laminating them and placing Velcro dots on the back. I also laminated some coloured paper and placed Velcro dots on these so that I could quickly and easily make up a visual schedule at a moments notice. You really only need to do this though if your kids need lots of visual cues and I’m sure most of you will only need to make up one or two schedules. For ideas on other schedules that I use including a school holiday choice board click here.