For many autistic students, the hardest moments are not the big ones. They are the ordinary ones that arrive without enough warning. A schedule change. A new face in the classroom. A trip to the doctor. Situations that feel manageable to most people can feel genuinely overwhelming when the sequence of events is unclear and the outcome is uncertain.

Social stories and visual supports are two of the most practical tools we use at AIA to address this. As we close out AAC Awareness Month, we wanted to share how these tools work, how we use them inside the school day, and what families can try at home.

 

What a Social Story Is

A social story is a short, individualized narrative that describes a situation from the perspective of the person who will experience it. The concept was developed by Carol Gray in the early 1990s and has become one of the most widely used communication and preparation tools in autism

education.
A good social story does not tell a student what to do. It tells them what to expect. What the situation will look and sound like. What others might say or do. How the student might feel. That descriptive quality is what makes social stories useful. When a situation feels familiar before it happens, there is less for the nervous system to work through in the moment.

At AIA, social stories are one of the tools our team reaches for when a student is approaching something new or potentially stressful. They can be written, illustrated, recorded as video, or built using symbols from a student’s AAC system, whatever format the student understands and responds to best.

 

When We Use Them at AIA

Social stories are most useful for situations that are predictable in structure but unfamiliar or anxiety-producing for the student. Inside the school, that often means things like a substitute teacher, a field trip, a schedule change, or the start of a new school year.

The key is specificity. A story about what happens when there is a substitute teacher at AIA, who will greet the class, what the day will look like, and what the student can do if something feels different, is far more useful than a general story about handling change. The more concrete and specific the story, the more effectively it reduces the unknown.

 

How Visual Supports Work Alongside Social Stories

Visual supports are any tool that uses images, symbols, or written words to communicate information that speech alone may not convey reliably or consistently.

For autistic students, verbal instructions require a significant amount of processing. A student who is managing sensory input, emotional state, and social demands at the same time has limited working memory available to hold onto what an adult just said. A visual support externalizes that information. It is available to reference as many times as needed, without the student having to ask and without the adult having to repeat.

At AIA, visual supports are integrated throughout the school day in forms that are matched to each student’s needs. Some students use full daily visual schedules. Others use a first-then board that shows the next two steps. Others benefit from visual cues for emotional identification or step-by-step task instructions. The form is always in service of the function: reducing uncertainty and making the environment more navigable.

 

How Families Can Try This at Home

You do not need professional training or special software to create a basic social story for your child. The structure is simple.

Describe the situation in concrete, literal terms. Where will it happen? Who will be there? What will it look and feel like?

Walk through the sequence of events in order. What happens first? What comes next? How does it end?

Name how the student might feel. Acknowledging that something might feel hard, unfamiliar, or confusing normalizes the emotion before it arrives.

Include one or two things the student can do. Not a list of rules, but simple, concrete actions they can take if they feel unsure or overwhelmed.

Read the story with your child in the days before the situation, more than once. Familiarity is the mechanism. One read the night before offers far less than several reads spread across a few days.

 

Connecting Home and School

If there is a situation coming up that you think your child would benefit from preparing for, tell us. Our team creates and adapts social stories and visual supports regularly, and when we know something is coming in your child’s world, we can build preparation into the school day as well.

The reverse is equally true. If we are using a visual support at school that is working well, ask about it. When the same tools show up in both environments, students generalize their use more quickly and feel more consistently supported.

That coordination between home and school is one of the most useful things we can offer. It costs very little and makes a real difference for the students who need it most.

Learn more about how AIA supports communication throughout the school day: https://autisminspired.org/aac-communication-supports-school-day-aia/