Following Directions with Toca Pet Doctor

I’m constantly looking for new and fun ways to work on following directions; especially for my patients who have Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, which is best treated by varying activities and tasks. One of my favorite apps to use for any and all speech and language treatment is Toca Pet Doctor. This app isn’t one of the free ones from Toca Boca – it costs $3.99, but I also use it for social inferencing and irregular past-tense verbs.

Single-Step: These are the easiest in this app. You can simply tell the child which pet to help! The animals that are most limited (so I use them for single-step directions) are the cat, blue bird, frog, egg (snake), worm, and yellow bird.

2-Step: Use the beaver (“brush the her top teeth first, then the bottom”), the snail (“feed her the apple 1st, then the leaf”), the spider (“put drops in his big eyes 1st and small eyes 2nd”), and mouse (“pop the big bubbles 1st, then the little bubbles”).

Multi-Step/Temporal: Use the rabbit (tell which bandage to put on 1st, 2nd, 3rd, & last, then what to feed 1st, 2nd, & 3rd), the lizard (tell which food to feed 1st, 2nd, & 3rd), the snail (tell which food to feed 1st, 2nd, & 3rd), the pigeon (tell which size bone to place 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, & 5th and which food to feed 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.), and the dog (tell which color fleas to grab 1st, 2nd, & 3rd and then what size and color treats to feed 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.),

Conditional: Use the turtle for “and” (“pull his front feet and push his back feet”) and the pigeon for “all”/”some” (“feed all/some of the berries”).

The only down-side to this app is that the options for directions are little limited so the kids often memorize them and I can only use it a couple times before I need to switch to a new app.

Here are more ideas for using Toca Pet Doctor for speech & language treatment.