Help! My PECS are Missing! PECS Hack

Let me start by saying I LOVE PECS!  Having my students communicate their wants and needs is amazing, but those little pictures seem to get lost EVERYWHERE!  We find icons all over the school!

I don’t know about you, but I have a pretty rough and tumble group of students this year.  It doesn’t matter how much velcro I put on the back of those things, they’re always going missing!  And of course, when you want to do a formal PECS lesson time with your student to work on attributes their icons have fallen off the book and gone missing!

Know what’s even worse?!  When you find an icon that has gone rogue and you have no idea who it belongs to!  Sure, I can go search each PECS books and figure out who it belongs to, but this teacher ain’t got time for that!  I came up with a quick way to return those missing PECS and I want to share it with you!

I’m sure you’ve heard me talking about color coding literally everything in my classroom.  Guess what?  Our icons are no different!  When a student enters my classroom, they are assigned a color.  That color follows them through their career in my classroom.  When I have a PECS learner, their icons get color coded too.

When a new student enters my class, there is some prep time to get this task done, but when it’s done, it’s done and it saves my sanity for the 3-4 years I spend with the student.  Most of my students come from our preschool program and have a PECS book with their known words so I make new icons for those words.  When I’ve printed out the icons, I glue them to their color construction paper and get cutting.  Then it’s time to laminate, cut, and velcro their icons.  Now when I have an icon go missing all I have to do is flip it over and look at the back.  I know exactly who has lost their word and which book to return it to!

I’m telling you, this system has been amazing!  I have found icons on the playground and known exactly where to return them and my buddies have the vocabulary they need at all times!