At home speech therapy practice: Direction following
Now that your child is following 1-step directions with your help, we’re going to work on helping them complete directions unrelated to what they're already doing. Completing these directions requires your child to shift their focus, which will be more difficult than completing directions related to their current activity.
Practicing at this level will give you greater insight into what words your child actually understands, and it will help the child work toward following more novel directions independent of your help.
Tips for your at home speech therapy practice: Direction following
Tip 1 - The right directions at the right times
For the purposes of this lesson, you should give directions that are unrelated to whatever activity your child is already engaged in. For example, if your child is playing with blocks, you can tell them “Go put on your jacket.”
It’s important to wait and see how your child responds BEFORE providing them with any context clues that it may be time to leave the house, like putting on your own jacket or grabbing your keys. This will ensure that your child is responding to your words, NOT a memorized routine.
And remember, a one-step direction should always:
contain a specific verb (or action word) and a specific item or object,
relate to something outside of an everyday routine,
and serve a specific purpose. It helps if your child knows they are following your direction for a reason.
Tip 2 - Reduce the amount of help you provide over time
Now, I’ll provide you with step-by-step instructions to incrementally reduce the amount of help your child needs to complete unrelated one-step directions:
Attempt 1: In your first attempt, ask your child to follow a direction, and do not offer any help. For example, tell your child, “Bring me your cup.” Do not point to the item, indicate where it is, or suggest in any other non-verbal way what you want your child to do — don’t even look toward their cup. If at any point your child successfully completes your direction, you do not need to move on to the other attempts. Instead, move on to practicing a new direction.
Attempt 2: If your child does not complete the direction, now say “Bring me your cup” while pointing to where their cup is.
Attempt 3: Tell your child the direction again, this time pointing directly to their cup and gesturing with your hands for them to bring it to you.
Attempt 4: Finally, ask your child to complete the direction one more time. As you say “Bring me your cup,” give them the cup and help them hand it back to you. At this level, you are doing the task together.
Remember, repetition helps your child learn faster. This requires a lot of patience in the beginning stages, but it will soon pay off!
Tip 3 - When following novel directions, repeat vocabulary to learn
One simple reason your child might not follow an instruction is that they don’t yet know the meaning of all the words you used.
This often happens when you practice following novel directions, or directions you haven’t asked your toddler to do before. You might be practicing with directions with action words or names your child hasn’t learned yet. These situations are great opportunities to help your child learn new words.
If you find that your child doesn’t know what the word “pear” means, for example, incorporate a pear into one of your daily activities. Give your child the choice of a pear or an apple at snack time every day that week, or have their toys pretend to eat a pear during playtime. It is best to practice with one or two new words at a time.
You’ll know your child understands a new word when they can successfully complete directions containing the word several days in a row, without any help.
Download our at home activity guide for 3 activities to help your toddler learn to follow new 1 step directions ↓
Following Novel Directions At Home Activity: Toy combinations
Materials:
Pick 2-3 toys activities that don't typically go together in your house.
ideas include:
dollhouse + firefighters + flowers
play food + dinosaurs + magnatiles
animals + cleaning accessories (mop, broom, washcloth etc) + cardboard box
Set-up:
Pick 2-3 toy activities that don’t typically go together in your house. This provides opportunities for new directions to follow, that are not the typical ones with that specific toy. Some examples are above. Choose your items and have them all available in the play space.
What to do:
Give your child a direction that combines these toys in a new play action such as “sweep the roof” or “feed the dinosaur some pizza”. These directions will depend on what play items you have provided. Your child may only want to play with one play item at first, in his more typical way, and that’s ok. Give the direction and offer support, then model these new play combination ideas to help your child be flexible in their play actions.
If your child is still reticent to play in seemingly strange ways, offer a direction that more closely resembles how they typically play with the item such as “sweep the dinosaur’s floor’ (instead of just “Sweep the floor” that might be more expected, but not as strange as “sweep the roof”)
What to say:
Examples of unique or novel 1-step directions for the toy ideas above might include:
build a big flower on the roof
squirt that flower down
help the firefighter go potty
hide the baby under the flowerpot
dinosaur wants to drink hot coffee
build dino a big big house
put dinosaur’s lunch in the box
sweep the bear’s roof
wash the big windows
hide the broom under the house
Download PDF activity guide for this activity + 2 More ↓
You May Also Like These At Home Speech Therapy Tips And Activities:
Created In Collaboration By:
Stephanie Keffer, MS CCC-SLP
Stephanie Burgener-Vader, MA CCC-SLP
Melissa Sartori, MS CCC-SLP
Yvette Faire-Bostick, MS CCC-SLP
© 2020-2022. Stephanie Keffer, MS CCC-SLP. All Rights Reserved.
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