A-Man still uses a lot of scripting to communicate, so I couldn’t help but smile when he shouted “seatbelts, everyone!”

He got really excited that the PLAYMOBIL School Bus lights actually light up just like a real school bus. 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.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. 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. The lights at the front actually flash, and the bus door actually swings open like a school bus would.

With this social story, your autistic child will have a solid understanding of the entire process of riding the bus to school each morning.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). 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. I was really impressed with the PLAYMOBIL toys that are high-quality and had such a strong attention to detail. 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. 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!