Special Education Visuals
If you think there are “too many” visuals in your classroom, think again. There could never be enough visuals in a special education classroom. I heard a quote once that I now say often- visuals are GOOD for all and NECESSARY for some. Isn’t that the truth?! Keep reading to see how I include a recess contingency visual plan in my special education classroom.
So this visual is called a contingency plan. You can make a lot of different kinds of contingency plans to support your students. I create these for anything in the classroom that can cause student anxiety and stress. It’s a bit of a ‘if this happens…then this will happen’. You can do it for behavioural concerns, or circumstantial concerns (such as the recess contingency one from above). The first picture are some weather cues that match to different results. So if it is snowing or raining have students point to that part and see what the options may be for that resulting climate. This helps students understand what may happen if certain circumstances happen outside of teacher/student control.
Keep reading to see how and where to incorporate a variety of visuals in your special education classroom today!
The first suggestion would be to use a program for your visuals. This way your visuals are cohesive and they all look the same. I use the program Boardmaker (Boardmaker Online) as it is provided by my district. i know that these types of programs can be pricey, so if you need to mix and match visuals- that’s ok too. Just find something that looks somewhat cohesive for a more appealing look.
Theres no way that you can have OVER visuals, or too many visuals. It’s just not possible. If it is possible, I haven’t seen the classroom as of yet. More instructions, visual cues and more are always a good thing in ALL classrooms, but are absolutely essential in special education classrooms. So if you think you have too many visuals in your classroom, you are on the right track.
My final advice regarding visuals would be to always model the visual. The recess contingency plan that I discuss in the beginning of this blog post had to be shown over and over before students were able to do it independently. That is ok, in fact, that’s great. It means you are doing your job right!