How to Teach Children to Tell You What Happened Today

All right, today we're going to talk about why your child, who is speech delayed or on the, on the spectrum, cannot tell you what happened during the day. So I get this question all the time. They're like, ming, my kid can't tell me what happened at school when I asked, how was your day? So when I did a video like this before already, which I talked about it a lot, but I just want to summarize it here real quick in the shortest amount of time. So the first point is that is your child able to talk about the concept of then and there? Right when children just started to get language, to acquire language, they can only talk about here and now, things are happening right here, right now in front of me. Right there and then is a different concept. They probably don't have the concept to talk about, like the timings or whatever. Just to let you know, for a child to answer the when question, that actually is harder than why, which is like around five to six years old, when a child can truly understand the concept of when, time is a hard construct and a concept to grasp. So that's my first point. The second point is, are you jumping through a lot of steps? Like, have you been jumping a lot of steps and thinking about why my child won't recall what happened at school? Not even a little bit. Well, the thing is, can they even recount a story that they learned before? Are they able to tell a story? Are they able to tell you how to play a game? Are they able to do these things? Right? If your child is stuck at one sentence per utterance, meaning every time they say one sentence at a time, they can't even do multiple utterances. So even if they did understand the concept of like, how was your day? The then and there and the when questions, can they even speak in a way that would make it so that you don't have so many follow up questions and annoy the heck out of them? Right. So, and that happens to me when I have to speak in a foreign language. Like, they asked me, oh, how was whatever? And I was like, I'm gonna say one sentence or one word and they're gonna keep on saying something, so I'm gonna pretend I don't know. Right. This happens a lot as well. That's why when stuff does happen, like something bad does happen, the child is able to say, pain, hit, someone hit me, or like, someone hit me, whatever. But when you ask them why, what happened or whatever, they're like, I don't know, and they start crying and stuff. So the language demand is too high in terms of the language ability. So that's why. When should you expect a child be able to learn this and how do we usually teach? So it's very simple. This is what I teach parents and this is what has been working. The first step is your child has some prerequisite skills. The first thing is, can they tell a story? Can they put like the sequencing cards, the story cards into like their correct sequence and tell you from start to finish with the understanding of telling you the setting, for instance, the time, place and what happened. Right. Any story, like even Star wars, far, far away in the galaxy, whatever, a long, long time ago and on the planet, whatever. Then you know, like, that's the time, the place, and who, like Luke Skywalker discovered like, whatever, blah, blah, blah. So can they do that? Right, they can do that now. So once they can do that, what I want parents to do usually is I tell them, look, we'll go out with them and we'll take pictures of the day and we keep on going. And then at the end of the day, you can ask them, how was your day? But then the thing about, the tricky thing about how was your day is because you don't know how their day went, so you cannot prompt them. But if you spent the day with them, then you know what happened during the day and you can prompt them. And prompting verbally will not help the kid. They need visual cues in order to recount what happened during the day. Right, because recounting and also constructing the language are two different demands inside of the brain. And you want them to only focus on the language production of which you can prompt. So you show them the pictures that you did in the morning. So how was your day? Let me help you see what happened first. Oh, in the morning we went to, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we saw. That's right. And then the next one you swipe. And in the afternoon we went to the cinema and we watched the movie. And then you can also, like take pictures during the movie. Oh, can you tell me a little bit of the movie? Oh, yeah, it was about Spider Man. Spider man went to whatever. He got caught. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, yeah, that's right after the movie. And then we went to. Oh, we went to, you know, we went to whatever. We went to eat dinner with Grandma. Let me see, tell me more about the food. And then you have pictures of the food and you keep on going. We had this and we had that. We'd all had. This was yummy. This is not yummy. This had too many, like, too many stuff inside. This is crispy. This was the soup or whatever. Nice. And what happened next? And then dad got the car and you can show him. Went to the car park and then we went home. That's how you prompt. So after you get that part correct, you can start taking out those cues, those pictures. And once for sure, because you went through the day with the kid and you're able to teach those sentences, that framework of how to recount something. And then now you can start asking things that you haven't experienced yourself, right? And because you've given them a framework, given them how to think, how to recall things, then would make sense. Because a lot of times I see parents are like, they don't know how to do this thing. Oh, no. It was like 0 and 1. They don't think about the middle steps. So think about the middle steps. This is how we taught parents to help children recount the day. And it's been working. You can try it yourself, but remember the prerequisites. All right? Do those first. All right? Tell stories, able to put things in sequences, have connectives in their speech, right? Can tell the story with story grammar and story elements. You can search that online. Story grammar, speech therapy, you can look at that. The most important one is the setting. The very first thing that they say, right? In the morning, George and Michael went to the club and got some pop sodas, right? So once they match that, you can start using the phone method and teach them how what happened during the weekend when you're with them, all right? And then you can start asking those questions. You can even ask for pictures from the school, from the teacher. Nowadays, teachers are always on their phone and they would send pictures to the parents. I don't know if this is the case in. In other countries. This happens in Asia all the time. So you get those pictures, you get it back, and you can use it as a cue. Even if you don't know, you can. You can see how much information the kid can extract from the pictures, right? That's all I have for you today. If you want to learn more about this stuff, of which we share a lot of these parents from our coaching programs, parents themselves, they have ways to teach children at home. They share it on our community platform and our course platform. You can just go to wwagents of speech.com course. Sign up there, put your email there, and we'll send you a link for you to apply to. Get in. All right, that's it. For now. I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye. Bye.