Prompt Hierarchy

Toddlers are toddlers. And it’s ok to be a toddler. 👧🏼🧒🏻👦🏾👧🏽 Toddlers are learning every single day. Toddlers don’t always use their manners. It is up to their caretakers to teach those manners.  

🌟 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦For a long time now we have been working on making requests in a polite manner.  

For example, turning “I want my milk” into “can I have my milk please?”.  

Recently, I felt like we were not making much progress… but then I remembered the prompt hierarchy and it dawned on me that we were stuck in the verbal prompt phase… So we started to move to a gestural prompt in hopes to soon see them make appropriate requests independent.  

🤷🏻‍♀️ What are prompts? 🤷🏻‍♀️ Prompts are a teaching tool. Prompts are something we add to a situation to 🌟 increase the likelihood 🌟 of our kids responding correctly. If you want them to flush the toilet, you may point to the flusher. You hand them their breakfast and say, “what do you say?” to get them to say thank you. These are prompts that cue our kids. 

What are some behaviors that you have to prompt everyday? Can you move forward on the prompt hierarchy?