how is visual cue sheet related to personal care?life skills?

they can be used to help the person sequence the steps required for personal care… and for any activiy for that matter.

Depending on the level of support, depends on how much each activity needs to be broken down.

For example..

For morning personal care. The sequence may be

wash your face, brush your hair, brush your teeth.

If the person knows HOW to brush there teeth and where to find the objects they need, just the 3 visual prompts may be required.

If they need step by step support, you break down each activity.. such as

picture of face washer (get the face washer)

picture of wetting the cloth,, ( wet the cloth)

picture of washing face (wash your face)

picture if wetting cloth (rinse the cloth)

picture of cloth hanging up (hang up the cloth)

You can also organise a shopping list this way. you can use labels from packets as the visual cues.

These are kept on the inside of the pantry with velcro. (Sheets of the loop part of velcro can be purchased for this. It is called MY WALL in NSW and FRONT RUNNER in QLD. you see this stuff on noticeboards where you put sticky velcro dots in what you want to hang.) another removable velcro board on the outside of the pantry. when you run out of something or need to put somrthing on the list, the person takes the picture from the inside and puts it “on the list” on the front of the door. This can then be taken to the supermarket when shopping. as the item is put in the trolley, the picture is removed and put in a zip top bag.

You can also take photos of the shopping isles so they can find the items in the shop. There are just endless ways visual cues can be used.

When i was working in schools as a disability speech pathologist, i helped a special ed teacher set up visual cue sheets for her young class who were going camping. These kids had moderate to severe diabilities. We had already set up the classroom for daily activities and timetabling so it wasn’t too much of a leap to set it up for camping. she made visual sequencing cues for everything the kids needed once they got out of bed. This included basic reminders to brush their hair to more involved sequencing activities such as brushing their teeth. She reported that they used them every morning to get themselves ready for the day. She watched them refer back to the cues to see what to do next. I can’t remember but i assume there were also the same sort of thing for the evening for getting ready for bed. It made them extremely competent and independent for these activities.

My daughter is deaf and we once used a velcro visual cue sheet. We had a poster board on the refrigerator with lots of rows of velcro on it. Every night I would line up her pictures corresponding to her morning routine: bath, clothes, brush teeth, brush hair, etc. It was her job to do each thing and then take off the picture when she completed that task. We also took small photo albums for our daily activities. I would put in pictures of the places that we planned on visiting. It took some time to get pictures of all the people and places we went, but it was well worth the work because she could understand what we were doing. I think that it helped to lessen her frustration level.

mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.kennedy