Teaching your SN teen to use the bus

[Claennister]

It is starting to become apparent that my daughter's friends are all able to take the bus independently to familiar places, and she would like to be able to join them. If they were all 100% reliable at sticking together, I wouldn't be concerned, but there have been lots of incidents where they have a minor fallout and DD would end up on her own, but usually they are round the corner and she walks back home. She takes much longer than others to grasp simple local routes (about 3 years to come out of the park and turn right not go straight on!) but she does get there in the end. The usual way she takes information best is by helping me to make a laminated visual instructions card where we draw all the things she will need to have and she will gradually learn the order of it all, but buses seem so complex and not so open to drawing.

There are so many moving parts that I don't really know where and how to start. You have to read a timetable, apply that to what time it is now, make sure you are reading the right day, remember where the bus stop is and look for the one going the other way when you get off, get the bus home in the opposite direction, make sure the number is correct, have your glasses with you (she won't see bus numbers without), figure out when to ring the bell, know when you have gone too far and what to do about it... We can't tackle all of it at once, so where do people normally start? At what point do you take the final leap and send them out onto their first solo bus ride? We don't often ride the bus in our day to day lives because I have a car and I'm disabled so getting on and off buses is a total nightmare for me, but we can set aside some time to do it together and go on some trips.

[Mary21]

We are in London so bus part of our lives. From young they would always ring the bell to get off. . Time tables again from young I would get them to look at but now they use an app on their phones. 1st solo journeys we all caught the bus but they did it as if we weren’t there. We did going home so Ds caught the bus home to dad and I caught the next bus. Phone contact to dad so knew Ds was on the way and could alert if didn’t arrive. Moved onto Ds catching bus and ds2 and me drove to town and met him.
We also rehearsed missing stop and what to do.
In essence loads of practice and small steps towards going solo.
Now brilliant at getting around unaided