If you’re busy setting up your classroom for the new school year, make space for a visual timetable. Whether you’re teaching in KS1 or KS2, a visual timetable will help your children sequence their day and help them understand what their day involves.
Children spend most of their time being directed by adults. At school, they have little say over what happens and when. Children in KS1 in particular, also have little sense of time and often struggle to understand the difference between five minutes and an hour. All these things can contribute towards children feeling untethered and unsure of what their day looks like. Older children in KS2 start to become more responsible for their own learning; knowing what comes where in the day can help them plan their time and activities more effectively.
Visual timetables can also help children who struggle to process spoken information. They can be really useful in aiding the comprehension of what comes before and after an activity to help children picture their day.
A visual timetable is a series of cards, each with a different image (sometimes accompanied by the corresponding word) to depict events in the day. Visual timetables can be used for young children at home to, for example, help them understand the getting-ready-in-the-morning process. Cards might show ‘wake up’, ‘wash face’, ‘brush teeth’, ‘get dressed’, ‘have breakfast’, etc. These cards are then placed in the chronological order in which they should happen.
In KS1 and KS2 classrooms, visual timetables can map out the school day so that children know when break times and lunch times occur, which subjects will be taught when, and when other activities, such as assemblies, will take place. Each activity is placed on a card that can be organised chronologically each day so that children can instantly see what their day will involve.
This will depend on the specific activities your school undertakes but generally, a KS1 or KS2 timetable might include cards for:
English
Handwriting
Spelling
Reading
Guided reading
Maths
Times tables
Science
Art
Computing
DT
Geography
History
Languages (e.g. French, Spanish, German, Russian, Mandarin, etc)
Music
PE
Swimming
PSHE
RE
ESR
Topic
Register
Early morning work
Breaktime
Snack time
Lunchtime
Home time
Assembly
Golden time
Choosing time
Library time
Story time
Circle time
Quiet time
Independent learning time
Breakfast club
After school club
Lunchtime club
For younger children, try to ensure that the visual timetable for the day is in place and clearly visible before the children arrive in the morning. This way, they can get an overarching view of what their day will entail as soon as they get into the classroom. This will help them feel like they can take charge of their day and understand what they will be doing.
For older children, you can use timetable monitors to change the visual timetable at the end of the day in preparation for the next day.
It can take a bit of remembering to make sure that your visual timetable correctly displays each day but once you and your class are in the habit of doing it, it will soon become second nature. You should soon start to see it becoming part of the classroom routine, particularly if you get into the habit of pointing it out and asking the children questions about what they will be doing and when.
One final point: if there are last-minute changes to your day (as there so often are in a school setting), it's important to reflect this in the visual timetable and draw children's attention to the changes. This is particularly important for SEND children who can be easily thrown off track by unexpected changes or events.
