Classroom tips: Making choices

Classroom tips: Making choices

A valuable way of promoting empowerment and autonomy is to allow the children in your care to make choices.

Creating opportunities for choice throughout the day may give the child or young person a sense of control over their own lives and may help them to feel recognised as a responsible individual whose choices are respected. It is not always possible to give choices at all times, after all there is so much we cannot control, but there are usually many opportunities throughout the day.

Some examples might be:

🌈 What to eat for breakfast
🌈 Choosing a favourite show or song to enjoy together
🌈 Choosing a dance move for all to copy
🌈 Choosing what order to eat their lunch or what item to choose for their snack
🌈 What movement break activity they need

Making choices may be challenging for people with autism as it requires flexible thinking and/or executive function, which are sometimes areas of difficulty.

These tips, however, may help you to support your child to make choices:

⭐ Make the choices visual:
If you present choices verbally, your child may find this difficult to process. If the choices are instead presented visually, your child will have more time to process the options and select their choice. This can include, showing the objects, showing photographs, symbols or a written list.

⭐ Consider how many options your child can cope with:
start with just two options and then gradually increase these over time. Too many may become overwhelming.

⭐ You can control the options:
Only present choices which you can definitely make available to the child and options which you want them to pick. (it is also okay, if they do suggest something not possible to say "yes, another day" or "not today" or "something first, then this choice" or "yes, later". You can use their daily or weekly visual schedule to show when it is happening to secure it and help the child move on.

Choices help all children manage an uncontrollable world. Good autism practice is often just good everyone practice, and this is a perfect example of that.

You can get a digital version of my choice boards in three sizes and access to my editable symbols template for just £3 today here. 

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