Sequencing Picture Activities for Autistic Children

Daily Schedules

• Since children with autism often have trouble with self-monitored organizational skills, a daily schedule can be a useful guide in helping your child to navigate basic procedures throughout his day. Sit down with your child and create a daily schedule together, using drawings or pictures to represent each step. Start with the morning tasks, such as brushing teeth, making the bed and getting dressed. Include afterschool activities like homework and light chores, and conclude with nighttime rituals such as getting into pajamas and having a bedtime snack. Display the chart in a common area of your home, or make a smaller, pocket-size chart for quick reference.

Picture Stories

• All stories follow an order of events. Instead of reading a story to your child, give him an active role in his own story construction to promote his understanding of sequence. Use picture cards or make your own with homemade drawings. Encourage your child to rearrange the pictures to tell a story. Draw his attention to order and sequence with visual cues from the pictures -- an image of a boy brushing his teeth with the sun shining through a window in the background, for example, should come before a picture of the boy sleeping in his bed. Use guided questions such as, ̶0;What did the boy do after brushing his teeth?̶1;; and ̶0;Did the boy hand in his homework before or after he arrived at school?̶1; to facilitate an understanding of sequential order.

Recipe Fun

• Children with autism often require more sensory stimulation than their peers. By enlisting your child̵7;s help in the kitchen, you can provide meaningful opportunities for her to interpret and interact with her environment through her senses of smell, taste and touch. Create a simple recipe card for your child to follow using pictures instead of words. A recipe for stuffed celery stalks, for example, would begin with a picture of a child washing hands. Next would come a picture of a child rinsing the celery. The third picture might show the stalks laid out in a row on a plate, while the fourth picture would depict a child spreading cream cheese into the stalks. Next would be a picture showing raisins being added on top and finally, a picture of a child enjoying the snack. Magazine images, Internet printouts or even simple clip-art designs make for suitable pictures in lieu of hand-drawn ones.

Numbers and Time

• Flashcard activities can help children with autism understand the order of numbers, basic mathematical computations and the concept of time. Encourage your child to arrange number cards in natural or reverse order, or challenge her to lay the cards down in a simple equation format. Use clock flashcards in conjunction with images that represent different times of day to teach her concepts of time, or make a game of it by challenging her to match the clock with the appropriate image -- pairing a clock card that shows 8 a.m., for example, with a picture of a family eating breakfast at the table.