Sasha and Sarah redesigned their preschool schedule system with double-sided laminated strips, reinforced Velcro, two photos per child at different heights, and color-coded icons. After a month, kids found their schedules independently and the classroom ran smoother.
Chapters
Okay, so if you watched the other video, you realized we cut out because, you know, internet's not so great in local public schools. Um, so we're just going to start over, um, talking about preschool schedules, and it'll just be fun twice. So we're going to kind of go over our schedules again. So a few months— weeks ago, I was sharing some pictures. We were setting up some schedules in a preschool class, and so we wanted to share the finished product. Sarah works in this classroom, so she's been seeing the kids use it and how successful it's been. So we're really excited to kind of share the makeover of these schedules. So last year it looked a lot differently.
Yep. Last year we had, we had 20 students. We have 10 kids in the AM and 10 kids in the PM, and as the year got going, we ended up putting all the schedules on this one wall because we don't have a lot of space in this room. And so it was just way too crowded. It was hard for the kids to find their schedules. There was no order to like AM and PM. The kids can barely, you know, a lot of them have trouble visually discriminating. They couldn't tell their name, so it became hard to use, and then it's not useful.
Yeah, and the schedules really are to help you and help your kids navigate their day. You want this to be as easy for them to use because it's something that's going to make their day easier. So the first big change that we made was we made double-sided schedules, so we get AM on one side and PM on the other side. So this room isn't massive, and and we didn't want to waste a whole other wall space putting other schedules that we're only using half the day. Um, so this would turn out really cool. We laminated some poster boards and then cut them in long strips, and then we have AM, the morning schedule for one guy on the front, and then the afternoon schedule for a different guy on the back. And this was great because now the teachers and the aides can set up for the whole day at once. Um, if you're a preschool scheduler whose teacher was AM/PM and you're doing that middle of the day like hustle, you got to redo tasks, redo work bins, redo schedules. Now it's just set, so it's ready to go. We put hard Velcro here, and as we set these up, we just have the soft Velcro on both sides. So if you can see, there's soft Velcro up here and then soft Velcro on this guy, so we can just switch it. Um, this is a corkboard, and actually something we did that I think helped a lot was we put on these hard Velcro dots, we put a staple right in the piece of Velcro, and it kind of reinforces that Velcro because we have bulletin board paper over it. So that was some little thing that kind of helps a lot.
And we've been using it for a month so far, and the staples haven't come out and the Velcro's held.
So that was the first big change we made. There's a lot more space. As you can see, there's space in between the schedules. It's a lot easier to just visually see the schedules all together.
Another change we made is from last year, we put the picture on the top and the bottom of the schedule because a lot of our kids have trouble visually you know, well, the height is too high, so we wanted it lower at their level. And then that— the higher one is helpful for like teacher assistants in the room, if you have different therapists that come in your room, or like subs. So we wanted it like in two spots so the kids can really, um, identify their own.
So I blocked off his picture, obviously, but there's a photo of this little guy on the top and then again on the bottom. So I was in here earlier today, and this little— and they're little, these are our little babies, you know, so they can't— they can barely reach their top picture sometimes. So This little guy was so cute. He was done with speech with Sarah and he came over here and he knew exactly, found his picture and he was like, "There I am!" and got his schedule right away. So I think that's been a huge help for helping kids identify their own schedules and being more independent.
Another change we did is, I'm sure a lot of you have used those little envelopes or paper folded to put the finished item in there and that ended up being really hard. They would fall off, it was hard to get the pictures in in for our kids because some of them have some fine motor issues, and then also hard to like for us to pull them back out and reset the schedule. So I found these little bins at the dollar store, and they were just like for, you know, little birthday buddy bags.
Yeah.
And so I figured like, this is great. I just reinforced them with some tape and put some Velcro on them so they can just Velcro right on, and then it's easy, you know.
They're just flopping the schedules right in there, um, because again, right now when we're working on the schedule we're not working on fine motor skills. Yes, a lot of our kids need a lot of practice with fine motor skills, but that's gonna be something that we do at a different area of the classroom. These schedules are to help them, they shouldn't be more work. And sometimes schedules, the way they're set up, especially for our little guys, end up just being more work. And they're like, this is supposed to be helping me and I can't even get it in the finished bin. So this again is gonna help make our little guys really independent.
The Another big change we did, and Sasha can talk about this, is we color coordinated each different area that they go to.
So everyone knows Boardmaker, right? We got our little conehead man. If you walk into any self-contained resource room, autism class, you know my conehead man. But really, these pictures look really similar. If you glance at a page of Boardmaker pictures, they look similar. And if you have a whole schedule up here of different conehead men in different spots, it's gonna be hard for our kids to discriminate harder. It's not saying that we'll never get there, but again, especially for our little kids that are new to school, new to schedules, making it as easy for them as possible, as helpful for them as possible, is just going to be better for everyone and help them be more independent. So every center has their own color. So library's pink, table time's blue, lunch is gray, and that coordinates with the label in the area. So this is the label that's by the door when they go to lunch. So they match it right on. They're matching, yes, they're working on matching the picture, but they're also matching gray to gray, blue to blue, pink to pink. So I think that that has helped a lot. If you have Boardmaker, you can just select the whole box to fill in the color, and I also sell a color-coded version in my store as well. And I've used these with kids with TBI, with severe and profound disabilities, with a lot of success because it's just giving that added cue that our kids really need.
And it's, um, just comparing this year to last year, like, I've already seen a huge change the first month of the school. My, like, new preschoolers adjusting the schedule way quicker than last year. And I think it's really helped because they can match it to the area of the room with the color. And like you were saying, it gives them a big, um, difference instead of just having to, like, look at these little, um, minor changes in the picture.
And another thing I think that you guys have always done here, which is great, is for speech, OT, a lot of our kids get a lot of different therapies, they just have one general therapy picture because again there's a lot of different parts of the room they're going to. They have lunch and snack and table time and circle time and playtime and that's a lot of new pictures for our kids to learn. And speech and OT and PT aren't maybe something that happen every day so they might be harder for our kids to learn those pictures. But you could make one general therapy picture, so this was their therapy picture, and that's for all therapy. That's for OT, speech, PT, um, social work, whoever's coming in, and they always go to the same therapy table. So that kind of keeps it really consistent, and they know they're going to work with a therapist at that time. So I thought that was something that was really great that makes life a little bit easier too on setting up that schedule.
And for that, it's— I also sometimes co-treat with the OT, not every time, but that way we're not both getting a picture like, oh, we need OT and speech. It's just therapy. Usually when I have the kids come over, I just say it's time for therapy, time for, you know, then I might say speech, but I usually just reiterate therapy for them.
So it's kind of like this other center in their class that they're learning how to go to. Yeah, but the color coding I really recommend, and then I just really love these double-sided schedules. In another classroom, I think I've shared a picture with this on my blog, we set up— if you don't have AM and PM classes, you have your kids for the whole day, Sometimes schedules can get really, really long because we have busy days. Our kids have short centers. You could also do this for morning and afternoon for the same kid. Yeah, we set this up upstairs. So in the morning, it would be this side blue. He had all of his morning stuff and then lunch, and then when they came back from lunch, they flipped it over. Because sometimes when you have like 15 or 20 things all in a row, that's super overwhelming. Um, so that's even a nice idea just to do with one kid having morning and afternoon so they can kind of see like, okay, just get me to lunch, and then okay, now get me to the end of the day. Yeah, um, would be a nice way to do that. So here's a close-up of some of the different color coding pictures. Um, each one matches one of these labels at the center with the spaces for the kids to match, so it's easy to see where to go. Um, anything else? I think, Harold, maybe I'm gonna pick up the camera in a minute and kind of show the whole with each of them, but they turned out really great. And it's just what's most important is the kids are independent. Getting, you know, 3, 4, and 5-year-olds independent— if you work in a preschool classroom, God bless you, you totally get what I mean. It's, it's hard.
And you want them to be a little, like you were saying, just more independent. It's a lot easier. They can come down, they can point to their picture, they can actually physically put it in the box now, they can match the colors. So it's been really successful already this year.
So the boxes are huge, and then having them Velcroing the boxes there too. Anything taped I think just seems to get pulled off more easily. That even though this isn't something we move off all the time, but then at the end of the day you can pull it off, get all the pieces, or grab it more easily. Stuff that's taped I think is like asking to pull it off the bulletin board, and once the bulletin board paper is ruined, life is ruined.
'Cause a lot of times like a kid actually grabs it, at least Velcro is forgiving and lets them knock the container off and you just put it back on.
And for this board, this was a bulletin board, we put bulletin board paper over it and measured the spaces for the schedules. I mentioned this earlier, but if you're just jumping on, putting— and I'll focus in on this in a second— stapling in the Velcro dot, huge. If you're doing anything Velcroed, whether you have anchor chart schedules, whatever, on a bulletin board where there's bulletin board paper, if you don't do that, every time you pull up, it's gonna pull, pull, pull, and eventually throughout the whole year will rip. So that's been great, and this still looks perfect, and we're like 6 weeks in. Yeah. So This still looks really good, and in all reality, we're only flipping these once a day and the adults doing it, not the kids. So obviously we'd hope the adults would be pretty gentle with it. Um, so I'm gonna pick this up, show the range of these schedules here. Um, but they turned out really nice. So there's— we got 10 in the morning, 10 in the afternoon, and of course, you know, life's gonna happen. We kept 2 extras because that's how things go. You never know if you didn't plan for it, they would come. So that's Plan your extra. And these are our 10 preschool schedules. So if you have any questions, shoot us an email or leave a comment here. We hope you like them. We'll probably do a blog post about this at some point. We took a bunch of pictures of our like process and thought process of the schedule makeover. So thanks for watching.
Yeah, it's been so much more successful than last year, so I love them.
And send us any ideas you have of other Facebook Live videos. Sarah and I can do. I'm gonna make her do more with me. Alright, thanks!
