How We Use Choice Boards
How We Use Choice Boards | What Is a Choice Board
A few months ago, we were struggling with Jackie getting dressed. She wanted to wear the same outfit multiple days in a row, wear pjs to school or under her clothes and this would usually trigger a melt down. It was a really hard few weeks. So we talked to her ABA team and they come up with the idea of a choice board for us to use to help Jackie get dressed. We decided to give it a shot!
There are lots of different ways you can use/make a choice board but the general idea is giving options. You can do this on posters, small cards, white boards, magnetic surfaces. The list goes on. We haven’t had a lot of success in the past using Velcro choice boards because Jackie likes to play with all of the pieces, instead of making any kind of choice. So I asked her ABA team to come up with something that Jackie would relate to better. After a lot of discussion, we landed on a bingo board! Jackie loves bingo so this was great for.
How We Use Choice Boards | How We Made It
In order to actually give Jackie the opportunity to choose her outfit every morning, I needed pictures of her dresses. I started off by taking pictures of all of her favorite dresses and then ones I wanted her to wear, that were in her closet. You can see that reflected in the first choice board. Her ABA team made this cute bingo board using Google Sheets I think. They put it on a small magnetic white board and included bingo pieces with magnets on the backs so we can cover each dress as it is worn. We used this board for a few months but I noticed we were skipping a lot of dresses that Jackie just wasn’t interested in. So I decided to make a new board!
I looked around and found a few websites that allow you to make a bingo board by uploading your own pictures. I ended up using Bingo Card Creator. I didn’t like the label at the top so I exported the board as a png image, put it into PowerPoint and added a new label on the top with a font and colors I liked better. With this board, I used only dresses that Jackie likes to wear. Which I learned after observing over the last few months. The remaining dresses I either put away into storage for future kids or listed them on Poshmark.
I printed the board out on card stock and then used Paris’s laminating machine to laminate it. I used tape to attach the new board to the white board. I also made a few more bingo board pieces so we can cover as many dresses as possible!
How We Use Choice Boards | How It Works
Every morning, I show Jakcie the choice board and ask her to pick a dress. Sometimes I point to each available option and talk about them until Jackie makes a choice. Once she has made a choice, I cover that dress with a bingo board piece. It took a few days for Jackie to understand that if the dress was covered, she couldn’t wear it but once she got that things went pretty smoothly.
Originally the goal was for Jackie to wear dresses for the week and then clear the board so she can start over fresh with all of the options on Monday. We did that for a few weeks but I still found that she was favoring some dresses over others. So I changed up the rules a little. Now, I’m not clearing the board until we have covered most, if not all, of it. I’m still doing her laundry every week but making Jackie pick from more than just a few options has expanded what she wears and has reminded her of some of her dresses that she has forgotten about. She has found dresses she used to love again! Once she completes a row, she gets a prize. This has helped encourage her to wear clothes out of her comfort zone. I stocked up on these little $5 princesses from the Walmart check out line as the prizes.
How We Use Choice Boards | Other Choice Board Example
Obviously this isn’t the only way to use a choice board, as I talked about at the beginning of this post. So let’s talk about a few other choice board options!
Another choice board we have used in the past is the daily schedule. We used this during the beginning of quarantine during the first half of 2020. Jackie was doing virtual school which meant I was basically homeschooling her. Jackie had completed about 1.5 months of special education preschool before Covid hit so we did have a little bit of structure that we could model. I knew her teachers had used a similar system in the classroom so I made this activity choice board to help with consistency and structure (you can read about why that’s so important here). For each activity, I used google images to find the right picture. I then laminated all of the pictures and used Velcro to attach them to the poster board. I used a plastic envelope pocket on the back of the poster board to store all of the activities. In addition to the activities, I made options for the month, day of the week, date and time of day for the board. Once we started using this board, I saw a huge change in how Jackie responded to transitions throughout the day since she knew what was coming. I allowed her to make decisions on some of the activities we did each day as well!