Routine Captain — Say the Plan, Then Sail

A way of turning an everyday routine (getting ready to go out, bedtime, setting the table) into a game in which your child says the steps before starting and then runs the routine from their own head instead of from your reminders.

  1. Pick one short routine your child already half-knows, with three or four steps — for example leaving the house: toilet, shoes, coat, bag.
  2. Draw it together once — four quick stick-figure pictures on a strip of paper. Your child tells you what to draw.
  3. Appoint the Captain. Before starting, the Captain “reads the map”: points to each picture and says the plan aloud — “First toilet, then shoes, then coat, then bag.”
  4. Turn the strip face down. “Can the Captain sail without the map today?” Your child carries out the routine from memory.
  5. Bite your tongue. If they stall, don’t name the next step — ask “What’s next on your plan, Captain?” Only if that fails, let them peek at the map themselves.
  6. Finish with a ten-second debrief: “Did you need the map? Which step was the tricky one to remember?”
  7. Use the same strip for a week or two, then retire it once the routine runs without it.

Variation: swap the order of two pictures one morning and see whether the Captain notices. Let your child be Captain for you (“What do I need to do before we leave?”). Or play it with a recipe — say the three steps of making a sandwich, then make it without being told.

Requirements

  • Space: Wherever the routine happens — hallway, bathroom, bedroom, kitchen
  • Surface: Not applicable
  • Materials: A strip of paper and a pen for the picture plan; optionally a captain's hat or badge
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child
  • Supervision: Light — the adult's job is mostly to wait and not remind

Rationale & Objective

“Remembers routines without constant reminding” sounds like obedience but is largely working memory: the child must keep a multi-step plan active, track where they are in it, and resume after each distraction. When an adult supplies every step, the adult is doing the holding-in-mind. This activity hands that job over gradually, using two supports with a strong pedigree. The first is self-directed speech: in Vygotsky’s account, taken up in the Tools of the Mind curriculum, children first regulate their behaviour by talking aloud to themselves before that speech goes inward, and a large body of research links young children’s private speech to better performance on demanding tasks (Winsler, Fernyhough & Montero, 2009). Saying the plan before acting is also the core of Tools of the Mind play planning (Bodrova & Leong, 2007). The second is an external memory aid that is then faded — exactly what Gathercole and Alloway (2008) recommend, noting that children with weak working memory tend to lose their place in multi-step tasks and should be taught to use aids for themselves rather than rely on adult repetition. Diamond and Lee (2011) reviewed Tools of the Mind among the approaches with some evidence of improving executive functions in young children, although later evaluations of the curriculum have been mixed. Asking “what’s next on your plan?” instead of telling keeps the retrieval — the part that needs practice — with the child.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: needs an adult prompt for each step; can point to the pictures but does not yet say the whole plan; drifts off after the first step
  • Developing: says the plan aloud with the strip in view and completes the routine with one or two “what’s next?” questions or a peek at the map
  • Proficient: states the plan from memory, completes a four-step routine with the map face down, and gets back on track by themselves after a distraction
  • Advanced: runs several routines without a map, notices a skipped or swapped step, plans a new routine aloud unprompted (“first I’ll…, then…”), and can coach a sibling or parent through it

Safety Notes

  • Choose routines whose steps are safe to do unsupervised; anything involving hot water, the hob, medicines, or the front door opening onto a road stays an adult-led step
  • Do not launch this when you are genuinely late — time pressure makes adults remind and children freeze; pick a calm morning or a weekend to start
  • Forgetting steps is normal at five and is not laziness or defiance; avoid sticker charts that punish lapses, and praise using the plan rather than perfection
  • If your child still needs step-by-step prompting for very familiar routines well after starting school, alongside wider concerns about attention or following instructions, raise it with their teacher or pediatrician

Hints

  • Playfulness: a paper captain’s hat, a salute, and “Aye aye — plan complete!” at the end. Pilots doing a pre-flight check or astronauts before launch work just as well
  • Sustain interest: move to a new routine once one is solid (bedtime, packing the swim bag, feeding the pet), and let your child draw the pictures themselves
  • Common mistake: reminding out of habit — “shoes… coat… where’s your bag?” Every reminder you give is a step your child did not have to remember. Count to ten silently before you say anything
  • No equipment: skip the strip and use fingers — one finger per step, said aloud on the way to the door, then folded down as each is done
  • Cross-domain: builds sequence language (first, next, then, last), self-care independence, and planning; drawing the strip is early mark-making; “how many steps are left?” adds counting
  • Progression: adult says the plan and child points → child says the plan with the map → map face down → no map → five- or six-step routines → child plans a brand-new task aloud → child spots a deliberate mistake in the plan

Sources

  • Gathercole, S. E. & Alloway, T. P. (2008). Working Memory and Learning: A Practical Guide for Teachers. Sage
  • Bodrova, E. & Leong, D. J. (2007). Tools of the Mind: The Vygotskian Approach to Early Childhood Education (2nd ed.). Pearson
  • Winsler, A., Fernyhough, C. & Montero, I. (Eds.) (2009). Private Speech, Executive Functioning, and the Development of Verbal Self-Regulation. Cambridge University Press
  • Diamond, A. & Lee, K. (2011). “Interventions Shown to Aid Executive Function Development in Children 4 to 12 Years Old.” Science, 333(6045), 959–964
  • Diamond, A. (2013). “Executive Functions.” Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168
  • Head Start ELOF — Approaches to Learning (P-ATL 8: child holds information in mind and manipulates it to perform tasks)