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Following-directions games
Following directions is a listening goal that gets tested with props and practiced with worksheets. On screen you can give a real direction, watch the child carry it out, and see immediately whether the breakdown was in the concept, the length or the attention.
These run from single-step directions for preschoolers up to multi-step sequences with 'before', 'after' and 'unless'.
Who this is for
- Children with receptive language goals around one, two and three-step directions
- Children who lose the second half of a long instruction
- Preschool through middle school, with harder sequencing at the older end
- Classroom-adjacent goals: children who need to hold an instruction while doing something else
Goals these target
- Follow a one-step direction containing one critical element
- Follow a two and three-step direction in the order given
- Follow directions containing temporal concepts (before, after, first, last)
- Follow directions containing spatial and conditional concepts
- Ask for a repetition when a direction was missed, rather than guessing
The games
Zoe's Playroom
Directions given in a room full of objects, with a level picker for length. 85 directions in the bank and a random selection each session, so it does not become memorised.
Open Zoe's Playroom →
Garden Grow
Directions with a growing result — plant, water, place. The visible outcome tells the child whether they followed it correctly without an adult saying so.
Open Garden Grow →
Airplane Adventure
The spatial-concept entry point for three to five year olds: in, on, under, next to, behind, in front of and between, in an airport and a cabin. The wrong choices deliberately share a landmark — "under the seat" has to be told apart from "on the seat" — so the preposition carries the meaning and a child cannot win by recognising the noun.
Open Airplane Adventure →Color It!
The youngest entry point: one direction carries two pieces of information, a color and a part, so a three-year-old is following two-part directions before they can follow two of them. Colors are assigned at random, so world knowledge cannot substitute for listening — a sun may need to be gray.
Open Color It! →
Drive-Through Dash
Listen to the order, build it, serve it. A working-memory load on top of the direction, which is closer to what a classroom actually demands. Nine language modes across four levels.
Open Drive-Through Dash →
Recipe Rush
Multi-step sequences with a real order to them. Better for older students, who find a recipe more age-appropriate than a playroom.
Open Recipe Rush →
Benny's Picnic Puzzles
Includes following directions as one of five skills on a spinner, for ages 4 to 6.
Open Benny's Picnic Puzzles →Running the session
- Find the breakdown pointIf a two-step direction fails, give the same two steps as two separate directions. If those succeed, the goal is holding the sequence, not understanding the concepts.
- Do not repeat automaticallyWait, and see whether the child asks. Requesting a repetition is a more useful skill than following a direction you have said twice.
- Vary the concept, hold the lengthChange one thing at a time. Moving from two-step to three-step and adding 'before' in the same session tells you nothing about which caused the error.
- Watch for the last-item strategyChildren who act on only the final part of a direction are not failing comprehension — they are failing memory. Directions where the first item is the critical one expose it.
Questions
Can I control how many steps a direction has?
Yes. Zoe's Playroom and Drive-Through Dash both have level pickers that set the length and the concept type.
Are the directions spoken?
Yes, they are read aloud at a slowed rate, and can be replayed. The text is on screen too for children who benefit from both.
Is this suitable for a child with an attention diagnosis?
It is often useful, because the same task shows you whether the child understood but did not attend. Keep blocks short and give the direction only once.
What about children with hearing loss?
The text is displayed alongside the audio in these games, so a direction is never audio-only.
Related activities
Built and used by a practicing speech-language pathologist. Nothing here records audio or collects information about a child — see the privacy notice. Games run in any modern browser on a tablet or computer.