I was reading the post about PECs and it got me thinking.

I LOVE anything for our kids that is visual in nature. From my experience I have seen the amazing things that Andy has learned through visual suports and the ways they have helped him. But I also know way too few parents use visuals because they don't think their kids need them.

I think they don't stop and think about all of the visuals that they use themselves every day and how challenging their own lives would be if they didn't have them. For example: phone books, cook books, post it notes, grocery lists, appointment cards, day planners, calendars, the TV guide... the list of visuals we use daily is just amazing!

I also wanted to say for those who don't know the difference, that there is a big difference between PECS (the picture exchange communication system) and visual supports.

PECS is a communication system, a methodology for children to communicate their wants, needs, and later as they become more adept, their thoughts and feelings.

Visual supports on the other hand are any way of presenting information in a visual manner. Social Stories can be visual support because you are supporting the words you read to your child (for pre readers) with pictures. For children who read, the written word (with or without pictures) is a visual support.

There are ALL kinds of visual supports!

With my son we never used the PECs program because he had some language and could say milk, juice, cookie, outside, etc... So we used a visual aschedule of all his day's activities.

(To be 100% honest here, I have to say that our autism consultant had to nag me for nearly 1 year before I finally started using a visual schedule with Andy. I was SO STUBBORN!! I would say "Andy knows his schedule", or "he can say some words so he doesn't need pictures." I was such a silly woman... I had an autism consultant who knew what he was doing but I wouldn't listen. Finally though because I kept complaining about Andy's behavior, I said "OK" and let the consultant show me how to do a visual schedule.)

With Andy's schedule I set it up from the time he got up, until he got on the bus, then beofre he got home I would put up the pictures for the afternoon until dinner, and after dinner it was the schedule until bedtime.

Andy removed pictures as each activity was done. This vastly improved both his language and his behavior. Over time "go check your board" was the most heard sentence in our house. He loved always seeing and knowing what was coming. He also learned the days of the week, concepts like now, later, today, tomorrow, yesterday, next time, soon, AND he learned how to negotiate and make choices. I loved to offer him choices. For example "when do you want to go to McDonalds? Friday or Saturday?" Andy might point or say Sunday. That allowed me to think for a moment then say ok Sunday is fine or "No we are going to grandma's on Sunday, (I'd point to the picture) we can do McDonalds Friday or Saturday."

I cannot say enough about the importance of using visuals.

Also I know some of you have talked about SCERTS and mentioned Emily Rubin. When she lived in Mass, she was our SP&L consultant. She went into the school and developed a color coded visual support program that was AMAZING in helping develop Andy's language.

Andy had a color coded sentence strip with squares that were for the agent, the action and the object of a sentence.
So the agent might be green the object might be red and the action yellow. Then he had a book full of pcitures where the agents, the actions and the objects were on backgrounds of the colors that matched.

The speech therapist could talk to Andy about something from his day or take a photo of him at a particular activity (say in gym) and say to him. What did you do in gym?

She would then work with Andy and show him how to match the colored picture to colored squares on the strip that would produce the sentence "I" (the agent) "played catch" (the action) "with the ball" (the object).

You cannot believe how his language blossomed as the speech and language therpist used this method with him!!
You should also know he was about 15 at the time!!!! Imagine how using this with young children would help their language grow?

As I said, I am a firm believer in the importance of visual supports!

I've included a link to an awesome website too (Linda Hodgdon, the visual guru!!) where you can get great information and sign up for a free newsletter.
www.lindahodgdon.com