Best of 2014- Toilet Training our Kiddos!

The 6th most popular post from 2014 was my post about Toilet Training our little kiddos. Well- sometimes they are not too little. This makes it even more tough yet SO much more important. Teaching our students to become independent should be our “end all” goal each and every day. Being independent in the area of personal skills is SO crucial! Using visuals in our routine can help make this skill so much easier to master!

I get a lot of questions about toilet training. Even though I teach upper elementary students, I do have a few students who are still dependent on adults with their toileting needs. I follow a bathroom schedule in my classroom where I take the students to the restroom 3x a day in groups with staff members. This makes it so that I have minimal distractors! If I do it whenever it takes my staff away from the other students and can be disruptive in work centers. Now- don’t get me wrong, if a kiddo asks to use the restroom- we RUN them to the restroom. This is just for the kids that are schedule trained.

Here is the first visual schedule I use with my kiddo’s. I typically use this one for my more advanced kiddo’s that just need the verbal/visual prompting.

This next visual schedule I have printed, glued together and laminated. I then taped it in our handicapped restrooms next to the toilet. This serves as a visual schedule for the child when using the restroom.

My last visual schedule is used on the back of my clipboard that my aides use when taking toileting data. This is taped to the back of the clipboard so that it can be used to prompt in any location. If a student is wandering in the restroom and refusing to sit on the toilet, my staff has this mobile schedule to prompt the student to the toilet.

Of course there is no wrong way to use these schedules. There are many ways you can adapt these simple schedules to meet your child’s needs. Also included in this bundle are step by step cards that can be pulled out one at a time for your lowest students that are successful with one prompt at a time.