Teaching Children to Follow Directions
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Why do many children, even without speech delays, struggle to follow directions?
Children with communication delays and speech and language challenges often have trouble following directions. Heck, children without speech and language delays have trouble following directions sometimes. So on today's episode of the Speech and Language Kids podcast, I am going to show you how to teach a child to follow directions. And we're gonna start with our friends who are just starting on following a one-step direction all the way up. through school age children who need to work on more complex directions. So we're gonna break it all down for you here today. I am your host, Carrie Clark. I'm a speech language pathologist and I am the owner of Speech and Language Kids. I am also live recording this inside the hub.
at hub.speechandlanguage kids. And so I'm going to be taking questions throughout from our members inside the hub. If you would like to join us on a live recording of the Speech and Language Kids podcast, you can join us in the hub as well. All right. Okay, so for those of you who are with me live in the hub, you can put those questions in the chat as we go along. But today we're gonna talk about following directions. And this is an area that I feel like comes up with most children with speech and language delays. It also comes up a lot in children who don't have any speech and language delays. And in particular, we see this a lot with children with attention problems, such as attention deficit. Sit hyperactivity disorder or autism.
But like I said, just any old kid off the street can also be struggling with following directions. And the reason for that is that it really takes a lot of different pieces and makes the brain work in a way that puts a lot of things together. We have to be able to hear the direction, we have to then remember and process what the directions said, then we have to be able Able to retain it long enough to actually do that thing, and then we have to actually execute. And if there are more than one step, we have to remember and organize all of those steps and not get distracted along the way. So you can see there's a lot that goes into following directions, which is why it is so hard for so many children.
So I'm gonna break it down. We're gonna talk about three different levels. Of teaching a child to follow directions. We're going to start with our little bitties, our toddlers, and go all the way up through school age. So hey, welcome guys. Those of you who are in here with me live, if you have questions or if you have specific cases that you want to talk about in relation to following directions, you guys can put those in the chat. Hey Tiffany, welcome. All right. So, there are, like I said, there's three different levels we're going to talk about today. And this is straight from my therapy pathway for following directions. If you're new to me, my pathways are these overarching plans that tell you which individual skills to teach in order to help a child overcome a specific challenge in the area of communication skills.
So this one is following directions. It's one of our Language pathways. And so we start off at our beginner level with just very basic directions.
What are one‑step routine and novel directions and how can they be taught?
And I am talking one-step directions at first, and then we get a little more complex as we go along. But at this beginning level, we're going to be looking at one-step routine directions, one-step novel directions, and then expanding that out into two step directions. directions or directions that contain a specific concept. So let me explain what all of those are. So a routine direction is something that comes up naturally throughout their day. It makes sense based on the context around them, and it's something they've heard before. A novel direction then is going to be something that is almost out of the blue, where it doesn't naturally follow what just came before it. Maybe it's a direction the child's never heard before, or it's just something that's out of context.
Next. Okay, so if we are on our way out the door and we're walking out the door and I say, Oh, put your shoes on.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do many children, even without speech delays, struggle to follow directions?
0:00–3:08
2
What are one‑step routine and novel directions and how can they be taught?
3:08–5:59
3
How can play, visuals, and gestures support teaching one‑step directions?
5:59–8:22
4
What strategies help children master two‑step directions and spatial concepts?
8:22–11:26
5
How do you introduce multi‑step (three‑ and four‑step) directions for older kids?
11:26–15:10
6
Why are temporal concepts like “before” and “after” important for following directions?
15:10–18:37
7
What advanced techniques help children follow complex directions in noisy, real‑world settings?
18:37–21:57
8
How can teens and older students develop independent strategies to manage multi‑step tasks?
21:57–24:39