What is a Visual Bridge?
Think of the purpose of a bridge. It connects the land on one side of the river with the land on the other side of the river. The bridge connects two environments, allowing people to move from one side or city to the other. Visual Bridges serve the same purpose. They are visual tools that help students to communicate information about themselves and their lives to other people in other environments.

Please explain more!
One of the greatest desires of families, teachers, and friends of these students is to find out more about them and their life experiences. This is the information on which friendships and relationships are built. These students don't tend to be very skilled at sharing information about their lives. Students who are non-verbal or those with limited language ability need support to be able to share information. Even those students who have more conversation ability frequently have difficulty remembering what to say, staying on the topic of the conversation, or giving all the information.

How does this work?
Think about what can happen when a student comes home from school to face a question like, "What did you do in school today?" Depending on the student, there may be no answer or there may be an answer with a lot of words but not much content. Teachers face the same dilemma. Great effort is often put into attempting to extract information from students about their experiences outside the classroom. When questioning to find out what has happened in a student's life in another environment, the communication void can be wide.

Today at School and Last Night at Home are communication tools that the student prepares in one environment to help him communicate more effectively in another environment. Use pictures or written language or whatever other visual forms the student understands. Help him prepare a visual tool that gives some information about something that happened in his life. Think about the types of information students like to share in conversation. This is what I did. . . this is where I went. . .this is what I bought at the store. The process of putting the information in a visual form is important because it helps students understand what information to share with others. Then when the student goes to the other environment, the visual tool helps the student communicate that information to someone else. Because it is visual, it helps the person who is receiving the message to understand what the student is attempting to communicate. As communication partners, we can guide the student toward more complete conversation if we know some of the information.

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