How Mini Schedules Make Your Life Easier

We all love a good visual schedule, right?  Visual mini schedules are one of the most powerful tools in our tool boxes as special education teachers, providing structure, predictability, and increasing independence for our learners.  Visuals also decrease the cognitive load for our students, providing a prompt or cue that is permanently available—unlike a verbal direction that must be processed and remembered BEFORE being followed. 

If you’re finding that a student (or group of students) is successful with a whole day visual schedule, but struggling during certain times of day, you may want to try a “schedule within a schedule” or a “mini schedule.”  A mini schedule breaks one activity in your day into its routine parts, giving additional predictability and structure to one particular activity.  This can be especially helpful for activities that include multiple parts. 

I’ve used mini schedules for: circle time, small group time, mealtime routines, arrival and dismissal routines, and specials.  Mini schedules are similar to a task analysis in that both break a routine or activity down into parts or steps, but a mini schedule doesn’t break the activity down into individual behaviors.

Steps for Getting Started with Mini Schedules:

1. Identify an activity where additional structure may be beneficial, such as circle time or small group work time.  It could even be an activity not in your classroom, such as specials or an inclusion activity in general education
2. Identify the consistent smaller activities that occur during this larger routine activity—does your circle time always follow a predictable order with calendar, weather, a story, and songs?  Do your students always work on writing their name, counting, and letter ID during small group time?
3. Decide the order of the smaller activities.  For example, a circle time could include a welcome song, calendar, weather, story, and song choice.
4. Create visuals for each of the smaller activities.  You might want to color code these visuals to distinguish between the mini schedule and other visual schedules.  Think about where this mini schedule will be located as well—if the mini schedule is for a routine such as circle time, you may want to post it at your circle time location.
5. Explicitly teach each smaller activity, pairing with the visual.  You could start by asking your students, “What do we do first?” and point to the first visual in the mini schedule (i.e., “What do we do first?  Calendar!”).  When an activity is finished, you could say, “_____ is all done, what’s next?  It’s time for ____” and refer to the next visual in the mini schedule.  Continue teaching until students can follow the mini schedule independently.

Mini Schedules for Task Refusal Behaviors

Mini schedules can also be used to help decrease task refusal behaviors. Many students struggle during small group work. Tasks may be challenging or non-preferred (or both!), and students may engage in many different types of task refusal behaviors to escape or avoid these tasks.

One easy intervention to try is offering choice—choice of tasks and/or choice of order of tasks completed. Choice is well-researched as an intervention and easy to implement in a variety of settings. All the tasks still get done, and the student has an opportunity to take some ownership of their learning and see that their voice has power.

A mini schedule can support choice as an intervention! To use a mini schedule in this way, create a visual to correspond with each task that should be completed during small group work. Pair each visual with the task by placing the visual on top of the task to ensure the student understands the meaning of each visual, as well as pairing with the verbal cue.

Ask the student, “Which one do you want to do first?” and wait for their selection. Place the visual at the top of the mini schedule. Repeat this process until all tasks have been chosen. Now you have a mini schedule to use with the student during small group work. As the student completes tasks, cue them to move the corresponding visual to an all done location if appropriate.

Read more about classroom structures:

3 Visual Schedules

Create Your Master Schedules

Using Visual Schedules

Classroom Setup and Organization