With this social story, your autistic child will have a solid understanding of the entire process of riding the bus to school each morning. And the play sets help to develop both cognitive and social/emotional skills, and I’ve found them really helpful for my autistic son. When I’m looking for, or writing, social stories I make sure that they don’t frame natural autistic behaviors as bad, and we keep everything very positive.

He got really excited that the PLAYMOBIL School Bus lights actually light up just like a real school bus. A-Man still uses a lot of scripting to communicate, so I couldn’t help but smile when he shouted “seatbelts, everyone!” Waiting at a bus stop can be dangerous if children don’t understand the social norms of where to stand and how to act while waiting.I wait for the school bus at my bus stop. When I’m waiting, I stand on the sidewalk where I am safe. I like to talk to my friends at the bus stop.” The social story is written from the autistic child’s perspective and helps them to clearly see what to expect and what others expect from them during a social interaction. I was really impressed with the PLAYMOBIL toys that are high-quality and had such a strong attention to detail. The lights at the front actually flash, and the bus door actually swings open like a school bus would.

Kaylene George is an autistic self-advocate, author, and mother of five, including one autistic child. She realized her own autism as an adult shortly after her son received his initial diagnosis. Suddenly the parts of her that seemed so “weird” to society had an answer. Since then, Kaylene has passionately shared about her experiences with autism from both sides of the great divide between parents and autistic self-advocates on AutisticMama.com. Once we read the social story, we used the PLAYMOBIL School Bus to act out how you would stand with your friends and wait for the school bus, and how you would line up to walk on. He had the students wait at the bus stop, and then made the loud noises as the bus pulled up to the stop.I loved that the PLAYMOBIL School Bus is so realistic that it made it easy for my son to really dive into imaginative play.

Now, if you haven’t heard of it before, a social story is a social learning tool that helps parents, teachers, or therapists communicate with autistic children (or adults!) about social situations that they may face. We got out our PLAYMOBIL School Bus and A-Man loved acting out some of the steps we had just learned about riding the bus!

PLAYMOBIL brings you imaginative play sets focused around iconic figures from a variety of worlds, both realistic (like police, firemen, school buses etc.) and fantastical (like modern-day dinos). Once all the students were in the bus, A-Man had a blast driving the school bus around and yelling “beep beep!” There is a lot of social interaction involved with riding the school bus, from saying hello to the bus driver to letting a friend sit next to you. In the “I Can Ride the Bus” social story we talk about how to handle these social interactions so that your autistic child knows what to expect and what is expected of them when riding the school bus. A-Man’s favorite part was saying hi to the bus driver because he pretended the bus driver was Papa!