Activity boards

It is time to talk about scedules and activity boards.

These are lifelines for people with autism.

It is said that people with autism lean heavily on routines, that nothing may change in their life or their surroundings. My opinion is, that this routine is at a high level a question of predictibility and safety. As long as their daily rythm takes place, they know what will happen to them. They will literally not open any new doors and be stuck in a circle of safe actions. In a forest where you don´t feel at home in, it is safest to take the same path everytime, otherwise you could get lost. On the way you have some obsessive movements to keep the gosts away.

We help them to make the surroundings predictable in another way, by using scedules in the form of activity boards. With an activity board the child, the grown up, can go and look: What is happening next? And then? Will the bus come today or will mommy fetch me by car? Who will take care of me today? The time does not matter in itself, nor the issues on the activity board. It can be something different each day, at different times, but it becomes visual and predictable. In that way, activity boards do not show a routine but helps the child to break out of it. In a way we offer a new map through the forest: There are other steps you can take, here are no wolves, going that path you will be able to pick flowers.

Before Christmas everybody in school went to church. You could take the hand of the child in your care, say church, a word he,she probably doesn´t understand, and start walking. Imagine yourself, somebody taking your hand, saying: núna förum við að hlusta á guðsorð, and dragging you along. I don´t think that I would be very happy. So we, in school, make a little virtual story for our little ones, using a computer program called boardmaker:

Picture of kids walking together to a picture of a church, a christmastree.

Next line: sitting on a chair, being quiet, listening, singing.

Next line: kids walking together, picture of school, working at the table.

You don´t need a computer for this. A pen and a paper is fine and little stickmen do their work as well.

If you have a digital camera you can take an afternoon and drive through town and take pictures of the places you use to go with your child. The mall, the park, the swimming pool … You can add a picture of what you are going to do there, shopping, playing, swimming … Put them in a little picture holder and you have a collection that you can show your child before you go somewhere. (Postcards would be fine, too). The point is, make the day predictable and visual. On the way you are likely to get rid of endless questions. Remember: Even verbal children are likely to have difficulties to understand speech, sentences, concepts or get distracted and forget.

Of course, activity boards as lifelines come in endless forms, each adapted in form, length and information to the need of each special child.

With the very little ones you can use things to show what is going to be done. A spoon for eating, a dollhouse toilet for going to the toilet, a little car, doll, cubes for playing, a favorite bedside story to go to bed. Whatever, your fantasy shows the way. You can put them in little see-through plastbags and hang them on a string with pags on a clothsline in a row. You can put the items in little open boxes glued to a board. You can fix them with sticking tape on a board you hang on the wall. Again: What suits your child, you, your home.

You can combine these items with colours. You can have a blue spoon fitting the blue plate and glass. You can have a red little toilet and a red toilet seat. You can have a yellow book and yellow covers over the bed. If your child is very confused and doesn’t find the way from the spoon to the plate you can build a blue (red, yellow, green…) way with bits of paper, cloths, a string of yarn. If the child strays off the right path start at the beginning. Be patient. It will take time for the child to learn this. The only thing we can do is to give him/her visual help.

Why make it so complicated? Why not just take the child and put it in front of whatever plate there is?

We want our children to become independent and learn their way around the house, the school, the world. They shoudn’t need us sitting like little elves in their pockets, telling them what to do next. There comes a day, hopefully, where they don’t need a hand to lead them, the earlier, the better. We want to get them out of their circle of safe routines and teach them to use an activity board to predict and take the next step. We want them to feel safe and comfortable in their surroundings. And don´t forget, life will become more complicated every year they get older. So, even if they do understand you now, have them prepared for the future. When they learn now to look at their activity board, they will still have use for it when they are twenty years old. Or forty.

When the child gets older and is coping with items, we would change over to pictures, preferably one item at a time. And then, still later, when and if they become fluent readers, we will use words. Remember our goal. We don´t want them to learn spelling or reading. We want to offer them an easy way to find their path in our world. Look at the pictures as traffic signs. There isn’t a sign out on the street which says: Stop your car here. No, there is a white line and a red triangle. Find the traffic signs for living that your child needs.

You can´t plan your day like that? For the sake of your child, try. At school it is easy, I know from experience that it can be difficult at home.

As life goes, there pop unexpected issues up all day long. At school I have a sign for my boy: An orange strip of paper with a red triangle on it: Change of plan. Change of plan is a part of life and has to be integrated. But don´t overuse it. The child must be able to trust his activity board.

Make little virtual stories if your child is a great sticker to routine. OK, your plan says that we are going to go swimming. We will. But on the way we have to stop at red lights. Every car has to stop at red lights. And sometimes Mommy has to stop and buy petrol. The car needs to drink too. But, yes, we go swimming.

But, how safe would we feel in surroundings completely alien to us? Being thrown out over the jungle, would we know what is dangerous and what not? Meeting this little sweet brown men who shake their heads when they mean yes and nodd for no, would we know how to behave, to act in the right way?

That’s probably how our children feel like, most of the time. More often than not the world is a dangerous place, with things happening without their understanding why. They learn as they grow up, of course. Most of them.

Being born into our world, babies with autism don’t know instinctly to look for the eyes of the person cooing to them. Probably they look at the mouth first, as it is moving. And the hair. For some of them our faces will never be a whole, but a pussle put together by eyes, nose, mouth and hair.

I tried this out with a very verbal and literate boy at our class. I asked him what my eye color was. He really tried. He asked me to turn my head, to look here and there. He couldn´t tell me that I have brown eyes. We could speculate about, why this was but would be no nearer. What we learn from this on the other hand is that we can’t assume that people with autism see the world and the others on it as we do.