Jen, a former autism teacher, explains why older students need age-appropriate visual supports instead of childish clip art. She shows real-photo visual necklace cards from The Autism Helper with prompts like write, sit, and quiet, and demonstrates how to use them on desks, boards, or digital platforms to cue expectations and schedule changes.
Let's talk about ways we can support older students through age-appropriate visuals. I am Jen and I am a former K-12 self-contained autism teacher. Now, one thing I was always doing in my classroom was providing visual support. I'm sure that if you are a special education teacher, you do the same. As a primary teacher, I used clip art all the time. One of my favorite tools were these visual necklace lanyards. I had set 1, set 2, and honestly, I had the crisis intervention ones because I was our district's CPI trainer. And so I often ran crisis interventions, and it was my job to help run the de-escalation team. With that, I needed a lot of visual support for students, for staff, and I loved these cards. In fact, I thought they were so important I made a set for every paraprofessional in our entire building. These were super popular because they provided appropriate support in a fun way that helped students be able to understand what was needed of them, but I didn't have to necessarily say anything, right? I could just show them the picture, I could prompt them, or I could show what their body needed to look like in that moment, and then I'm not using a whole bunch of language, right? I, I could give the support, especially in general education when your students are pushing in, or maybe they're in a busier environment. This is a phenomenal way to be able to support your students. However, what I found was our older learners needed similar support. However, clip art, well, it can look kind of babyish. We need to be very mindful of the supports that we're giving our students and make sure that they're age-appropriate. So even if your student is not learning on grade level, it's important that we provide age-appropriate materials that provide the right level support. So I want to provide the same level, but I want to do it in an age-appropriate way. So my student might still need support being reminded to blow their nose, but using clip art, well, again, that could look a little young for our high school learners, our middle school learners, or even our adult learners. So what did the Autism Helper do? They created a real photo necklace. I love this for older students. I'm gonna actually take it off the ring here so I can show them all to you. They correlate almost identically to the Necklace 2 set. So if you have Visual Necklace and the Lanyard 2 set, you're gonna find that most of these prompts are the same. Some of them have switched just because of age appropriateness, but these are so, so good. So you can see write, sit, raise hand, Look at the stop. So instead of using a cartoon stop sign, we have a stoplight. Slow down, work together, clean up. We know that these students who are older need real pictures. This is so important for them. Even things like last one or 2 more or 3 more, giving them a prompt of what it looks like when they need to be quiet in a real life way. These visuals are so good. I am so excited to be able to use them with my students. Just think about yourself as an adult learner, um, or an adult, right? You probably use a checklist to identify when you're done with something. How cool that that is the visual for done instead of, you know, a clip art or cartoon way. Following directions— we've got a teacher with directions on the board. How many minutes, this is a very familiar sign for them. They just made this so accessible, but even things like personal hygiene, having a flush and having a real person hold that, I can provide accurate support for students in a real picture way that's appropriate for those higher level learners, and that is amazing. What's even more amazing is that the Autism Helper just put this in the set for Visual Lanyard Necklace 2. So if you have Set 2, all you have to do is re-download and this is included. Now if you haven't gotten this set because you're like, "Man, I really want something for older learners," that's fine. Guess what? Now you get both. What I love about that is because as special education teachers, we never know the learners that we're going to support. Some days I might need real photos, um, and the next year I might need that clip art because, well, We support all learners all the time. So I absolutely love that they made it that accessible for you. I would love to know if you have these, how do you use these in your classroom? One of my favorite tips and tricks was to take these off of my lanyard and tape them to student desks. So if they, I had a student who often needed to take a break, I could just tape this image to their desk and then prompt them to take a break. Or if there were schedule changes coming up, I would put this on our board and use that image on our Promethean board. These can be used a million different ways. Like I said, they don't just have to be on your lanyard. So I wanna know how you use them. Let me know in the comments below. I love learning from you guys. You always have the best ideas.
