I am so glad that Christmas break is over and big boys are back in school! I swore I'd never be that mom, and I homeschooled them for almost 6 years, and them being home all the time never bothered me. Now, even just the weekend and I am wishing to go back to the relative peace and quiet of only having the youngest home.
Less than a week of them being back and school, and his behavior, which honestly had me ready to pull my hair out, has went back to pretty much normal. Now I dread spring break and especially summer break.
I finally found a program for my computer that makes visual schedules. It is called Picto Selector and it really works very well. The price is right at free. The program has apparently been translated from something else, I think Dutch, so the titles of some of the slides are written awkwardly and others have to be searched for using British terms. It does include, what I consider to be a bizarre number of adult slides given what the program is for. I'm not really sure how many people really want to be using PECS to discuss X rated activities, but the search function works well and it does include enough pictures that I have not had much trouble making schedules.
I also found an inexpensive app for Android devices ($1.99). I've only found a couple of other much higher priced apps for Android that deal with visual schedules, so this one was a welcome find. It is a very recently posted app, and still seems to have a few bugs. I was pretty upset when I first installed it, because it wouldn't start at all, but there was an update the next day and it now seems to have over 95% functionality, so I was glad I hadn't gotten around to uninstalling it. It is called visCards. The biggest draw for it is that it allows taking pictures with the phone and making new cards with them. For now, that is a bit glitched. You have to take the picture, X out of the error message, and then tap the make a card button again to load the picture from the phone memory to crop and label it, but it does make nice pictures. It then allows export of the new cards to a computer or directly to a printer if your device supports that.
The Sprout (age 5) has loved his new schedules! I tried the bedtime routine with him, and he looked at the schedule, went right to the bathroom for his bath, and let me wash his hair with no fuss, just because it was the next thing on the schedule. Then when we got to the end of it, he just went right on to bed, with no fussing. (He snatched the printout the next morning and threw it away, but he didn't fuss that night, and I'm going to laminate them to prevent damage). The school work and morning routine schedules have been well received also. I'm planning to use the visCards schedule on the phone to make errand running and shopping schedules, with cards made of actual pictures of the places we are going. Or maybe even visual grocery lists for him to help check off at the store.
10 Jan 2014, 1:54 pm
