Autism & Play: Themed Visual Supports For Special Education

Parents and educators often create goals for autism and play. Autistic children's play skills develop differently than neurotypical play skills. This is not bad or wrong, it's just different. This resource will help you support your students or child in expanding their play skills, as well as addressing other goal areas during themed play activities.

This resource is full of visual supports that will allow you to target specific language, social, and pre-academic skills with your child or student. Sometimes it can be hard to feel like you are “working on IEP goals” during free play, even though you really are! As educators, we need to be able to provide data to show we are making progress. My goal with this resource is to provide you with the visual supports needed to elicit specific skills and take data on these skills while playing together with toys.

These themed visual support sets include: vocabulary cards and board, core word cards and board, exclamatory/symbolic words cards and board, prepositions cards and board, imitating actions cards and board, color & numbers boards, sentence strips, social skills visuals (turn taking & sharing), 1 step play visual cards, 2 step play visual cards, ready-set-go visual, and yes/no cards. Within each skill category, you will find flashcards that can be put on a ring, as well as a one-page board to reference during play.

Vocabulary Cards & Board: You can use these to label the toys that you are playing with.

Core Word Cards & Board: Model the language you are using while playing. Have the core board ready so the child can use it when they are ready.

Exclamatory/Symbolic Words Cards & Board: These are so fun for children who aren’t saying words yet. Start with these fun sounds while you are playing. Refer to the visuals to help reinforce what you are saying. It will be easier for your child/student to imitate these symbolic words (vs saying words).

Imitating Actions Cards & Boards: Another beginning step to language development for many children is learning to imitate actions. You can have fun imitating these actions with the toys and reference the visual supports to increase understanding.

Prepositions Cards & Boards: For students who are ready to start working on spatial concepts, these flashcards and boards will come in handy. You can show and model the different prepositions or use the cards to have your student “copy” what they see using the toys.

Color & Number Cards & Boards: Use these for labeling and matching different color toys or counting the number of toys.

Sentence Strips: These sentence strips can be used to place animals or farm toys on and point to in order to increase the child’s sentence length in a visual and structured way. I love using sentence strips during play!

Social Skills Visuals (Turn Taking & Sharing): Visual cue cards to show and prompt turn-taking and sharing. Trading toys can be a precursor to sharing (”I give you a toy, you give me a toy”).

1 & 2 Step Play Visual Cue Cards: For children who aren’t playing with toys yet, these cue cards can be used to show what to do with specific toys for 1-step and 2-step play.

Ready, Set, Go Visual Cue Card: I love starting with “ready….set…go” activities with my little students. It’s such a great way to start in a fun and motivating way. Model it, and then start to pause after you say “ready… set……..). After a pause, you can say “go” if they don’t say it. Many times, this is the first word that I get my students to say.

Yes/No Cue Cards: These cards are meant to place toys on, and then ask the question that is on the card. You can model touching the “yes” and “no” pictures on the card.

Themes:

Farm

Vehicles

Kitchen

Vet/Dr

Trains

Building Blocks

Zoo

Dinosaurs

If you like these visual supports, download my free Visual Supports Starter Set to help your classroom run more smoothly!

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