Katie from The Autism Helper shows how to use visual supports to help autistic students fold towels independently. She demonstrates building a social story in Google Slides with the Read & Write extension, then using color-coded labels (green for "need to fold," red for "all done") and workspace zones to make the task clear and structured.
Hi, it's Katie from The Autism Helper. I wanted to show you a few of the visual supports we have in place for our students who are folding towels. First, we have our social story that goes through the steps of the job and gives some examples. I put this together really quickly by using Google Slides, Google Images, and Google Read and Write. There is a picture supported feature on that Chrome extension which makes creating visual support super, super easy. And then I also have just these— I like to give as much extra internal structure and visual structure as possible for our job, so students know exactly how much they have left and exactly their expectation. So here's just a super easy example. I took just Google Images, um, this is of unfolded laundry, and then I put "need to fold" in green, meaning like this is what we still have to do. So all the unfolded laundry you can set up on this side, and then over here I have a red "all done." So meaning, you know, when the laundry looks like this, it's all done, and the student can, can fold it and place it in the pile over here. You You could do this a variety of ways. You could put these in the bottom of two laundry baskets. You can separate even just the table or the folding station with a piece of tape, so the unfolded laundry's on one side, folded laundry's on the other side. But any way that you could bring some simple visual structure to the task, I think, makes it easy for a variety of learners to access and be independent with. So hopefully this quick little example is helpful and will help you think about how to bring some structure visually to some of your in-school jobs.
