Can you stand a bit more about Visual Schedules?

Last week I wrote my first post about visual schedules but I didn't get to tell you much about the great workshop I went to called "Family Activity Routines: Cooking, Chores, and Family Games" . There was a lot of good information presented that day but it was their use of visual aids for communication that really clicked for me.

The workshop my husband and I attended was wonderful; they were very generous and gave us a whole bunch of laminated Boardmaker pictures to cover different scenarios. I used to think we didn't need those pictures but then I realized that for us, it wasn't about vocabulary, necessarily. The Boy can say and understand the words bowl, knife, strawberry, apples, bananas and grapes, but the other day when I rattled them all off to him he didn't really know what we're going to do initially. But then I showed him this: