Kathy Coufal - Autism and visual scheduling

>> I'm going to talk about how speech language pathologists can help children who are diagnosed as on the autism spectrum disorder by using visual scheduling. Essentially visual scheduling is a way for us to present to the child the agenda for their day, or for a portion of their day. So when the child needs to know what will happen next, they see a picture, they know to recognize what that picture represents. They begin to map the vocabulary to that, and it helps them transition from one place or activity to another place or activity. The speech language pathologist's role is to help the child not only to use the visual scheduling in order to organize their day and make those transitions move smoothly, but also to give them the language and the social skills that go along with those kinds of movements throughout their day in terms of activities, requests for information, requests for objects, actions, and to be able to participate more fully in those events.