Planner recommendations please

[Seahorsesplendour]

Morning all! I want to get ds 7 a planner / visual calendar type thing to try & help some of his anxiety around what is happening each day.

just wondered if anyone had any recommendations?

needs to be more picture based than words

thanks

Does your school have access to Communicate in Print? If so, you could give them a list of words linked to your daily activities and ask them to print it for you. I've used this to create text for the life story book and a routine planner type thing! I think you can get a free trial of the software if school doesn't have it and you wanted to create one.

@Misstabithabean thanks for the suggestion appreciate it and have emailed the SENCO this morning 🤞🏻

Honestly this is the kind of thing AI is good for. I typed my DDs morning routine in and asked it to prepare a visual timetable with simple images for each activity and it created a PDF that I could download and print. The beauty is if the schedule changes for holidays etc it’s easy to amend.

That’s a great idea @Jellycatspyjamas I’ll give it a go if whatever school send back tomorrow doesn’t fit the bill thanks!!

We had a similar situation with my son and what helped a lot was using visual timetables with simple icons rather than lots of text. There are packs you can buy online with ready-made picture cards for things like meals, school, play, bedtime etc., but I also ended up making some of our own using free clipart so they matched his actual routines. Sticking them onto Velcro strips or a whiteboard gave him a sense of choice and control, and he could swap things around if the day changed.
If you prefer something digital, there are a few child-friendly apps that work like picture-based planners on a tablet. They let you drag and drop images into a daily timeline which is really handy when plans shift. The key for us was keeping it consistent and easy to read at a glance, so he didn’t get overwhelmed with too much text.
Might be worth trying both a physical version and a digital one to see which he responds to better.