Depending on how devoted to your child’s daily schedule you are, the title of this post MAY have given you a slight heart attack…#sorrynotsorry . Basically, all moms know (through trial and error) how important a schedule is to a child. I swore up and down that I would not be a schedule fanatic. Well, those words tasted like vinegar (along with many other words) when I ate them! My children have both proven that they thrive on a schedule. Deviations are not usually tolerated. But…
Yes, there IS a but! A little glimmer of hope. A light at the end of the tunnel. Ok, ok…maybe I am being a bit dramatic, but for a fly by the seat of my pants kinda gal, this whole scheduling thing is a huge Debbie Downer. I admit that I am a nap Nazi. Nap schedule is only broken if necessary (and there are few things I deem “necessary” to screw up nap time), but last year my eyes were opened to a different kind of scheduling that opened up many new doors for us! I wish I could take credit for this brilliant and life-changing idea, but alas I am not that cool. Or smart.
When we first started our journey with speech therapy for our son, he had some major behavioral issues that needed to be tackled, and this was one of our tools our fabulous therapist introduced to help with some of that. I present to you the incredible DAILY SCHEDULE BOARD!!!!! (please pardon my terrible iPhone pictures)
The Front Side
The back – aka the storage side
Now, this may seem a little utilitarian to you, and I am sure if you had the diy gene, you could make this much more easy on the eyes, but I do not, so this is our very plain schedule board. Let me give you a tour and tell you how we use it! Basically, this is nothing more than a styrofoam poster board cut into a small rectangle. I took pictures of everyday things that we might encounter: a place setting for meal time, toys for play time, Tigger for bed/naptime, books for story time…you get the picture. Then I printed them out as 2×2’s and laminated and cut them. Then, we attached the rough side of a velcro square to each picture and the soft sides to the poster board. On the front, we decided 5 was a good number to start working with. On the back, we attached a ton of the soft sides to house the pictures that weren’t being used!
Now to use this, I set up our morning’s activities on the board in order and once we have completed something, it is moved to the back. And once the activity is finished, we go to the board for my son to see and tell me what is up next for us. During his nap time, I switch everything out for our afternoon. This allows us to keep a “schedule” but not feel like we are in school moving from period to period everyday. The activities may change daily, but the way the schedule is presented is always the same, and he knows what to expect out of his day.
This has been a game changer for us, and I cannot speak enough great things about this method. Will it work for everyone? Absolutely not. But for us, we have learned to love the “schedule.”