When you ask your child how their day went and the answer, if it comes at all, is hard to hold onto.

Maybe your child has the words but can’t seem to find the order. Maybe they start somewhere in the middle, loop back to the beginning, skip to the end, and leave you piecing together a puzzle with half the pieces missing. Maybe they shut down entirely, not because nothing happened, but because getting from what happened to telling you about it is a journey their brain hasn’t quite mapped yet.

For children with speech and language disorders or delays, the gap between experiencing a day and narrating that day can feel enormous — for them and for you. It’s not a memory problem. It’s not a willingness problem. It’s a language organization problem, and it has a name: narrative language difficulty.

You’re not alone — and neither is your child. Fragmented, out-of-sequence storytelling is one of the most common concerns parents of children with language delays bring to Fort Myers speech therapists every single week. Children with diagnoses like developmental language disorder (DLD), autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, or speech sound disorders often struggle specifically with narrative structure — the ability to take a lived experience and shape it into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The good news? Of all the complex skills that speech therapy targets, narrative language is one of the most responsive to intervention. With the right strategies — at the clinic and at home — children with language delays can make remarkable gains. And those gains don’t just show up at the dinner table. They show up in reading comprehension, classroom participation, friendship-building, and self-advocacy for years to come.

Why Telling a Story in Order Is Actually Hard

To an adult, recounting a sequence of events feels automatic. But for children, it requires the simultaneous coordination of several complex cognitive skills — including working memory, language organization, temporal reasoning, and what researchers call narrative discourse ability.

Research published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research has consistently shown that narrative skill in early childhood is one of the strongest predictors of later reading comprehension and academic achievement (Justice et al., 2006). In other words, helping your child retell their school day in order isn’t just a conversation skill — it’s a literacy and learning skill.

What “Fragmented” Storytelling Actually Looks Like

Fragmented narratives typically fall into a few recognizable patterns:

• Jumping out of sequence. Your child starts in the middle, flashes back, jumps to the end, then circles back to something they forgot. The listener has to work hard to assemble the timeline.
• Missing the “glue” of connective language. Skilled storytellers use temporal and causal connectors — words like first, then, because, after that, so, finally — to hold events together. Children with narrative weaknesses often string events together with just “and…and…and…”
• Leaving out the “so what.” Strong narratives have a problem, a response, and a resolution. Fragmented narratives often leave out why something mattered — the emotional or causal core of the event.
• Assuming the listener knows what they know. Young children especially struggle with understanding that their listener wasn’t there and needs context clues.

All of these patterns are developmentally normal at certain ages — and all of them are directly addressed in speech-language therapy.

What Fort Myers Speech Therapists Do to Build Narrative Skills

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) use a research-backed framework called Story Grammar to teach children the building blocks of a well-formed narrative. Originally developed by Stein and Glenn (1979) and widely used in pediatric speech therapy today, Story Grammar breaks any event into predictable components:

• Setting — Who, where, when
• Initiating Event — What happened to start the story
• Internal Response — How the character felt or what they thought
• Attempt — What they did about it
• Consequence — What happened as a result
• Reaction — How they felt at the end

When children learn this scaffold — even informally, through games and guided conversation — they begin applying it automatically. They stop reporting events as a random list and start telling stories with a beginning, middle, and end.

5 Evidence-Informed Strategies You Can Use at Home Tonight

You don’t have to wait for a therapy appointment to start building these skills. Here are five strategies that Fort Myers speech therapists frequently coach parents to use at home:

1. Ask Sequencing Questions Instead of Open-Ended Ones

“How was your day?” is cognitively overwhelming for a child with underdeveloped narrative skills. Instead, try scaffolded questions that guide them through the sequence:

• “What was the first thing you did this morning at school?”
• “What happened next?”
• “Was there anything surprising or different today?”
• “How did the day end?”

2. Use the “First–Then–Finally” Framework

Teach your child a simple three-part retelling structure using these anchor words: First… Then… Finally. Research on dialogic narration — shared storytelling between parent and child — shows that children who engage in this kind of structured recall with a caregiver develop stronger narrative skills and longer, more coherent story retells over time (Reese et al., 2010).

3. Draw It Before You Say It

For children who struggle to organize verbally, drawing a quick three-panel “comic strip” of their day — beginning, middle, end — gives them a visual anchor before they speak. This strategy is especially effective for children who also receive occupational therapy, as it combines fine motor expression with language organization.

4. Be a Curious, Patient Listener — Not a Corrector

When your child skips ahead or gets jumbled, resist the urge to correct or reorder their story for them. Instead, ask curious questions that gently redirect: “Wait — did that happen before or after lunch?” This approach keeps the communication channel open while naturally prompting your child to self-monitor and reorganize.

5. Read Narratively Rich Books Together — and Talk About Them

Books with clear story structure (a problem, attempts to solve it, a resolution) are some of the best narrative teachers available. After reading, ask: “What was the problem in this story? What did they try? How did it work out?” This practice, known as story retell, is one of the most commonly used narrative assessment and intervention tasks in speech-language pathology.

When to Seek Support from a Speech Therapist

Most children refine their narrative skills gradually between ages 4 and 8, with significant development continuing into early adolescence. Consider reaching out to a Fort Myers speech therapist if your child:

• Consistently tells stories with no logical sequence, even by age 6 or 7
• Frequently omits key information, leaving listeners confused
• Has difficulty with reading comprehension despite decoding adequately
• Struggles to explain events in writing
• Has a diagnosis of language delay, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, or a learning disability — all of which can impact narrative organization

A comprehensive speech-language evaluation can identify whether narrative difficulties are isolated or part of a broader language profile. From there, individualized therapy goals are set collaboratively with your family.

The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters

The ability to tell a coherent story is one of the most fundamentally human things we do. It’s how we connect with others, process our emotions, advocate for ourselves, and make meaning of our lives. When children learn to organize their experiences into well-structured narratives, they aren’t just becoming better conversationalists — they’re developing the cognitive architecture for comprehension, memory, empathy, and academic success.

At our FOCUS Fort Myers pediatric therapy clinic, our speech-language pathologists work alongside occupational therapists and other specialists to support the whole child — because language, movement, attention, and learning are deeply connected. If your child’s storytelling has you wondering whether a little extra support might help, we’d love to talk.

The experienced Fort Myers speech therapists at FOCUS Therapy are here to support your child’s language development. Contact our pediatric therapy clinic today to schedule a consultation. We serve children and families throughout Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Estero, and the surrounding Southwest Florida community.

References & Further Reading

Justice, L. M., Bowles, R. P., Kaderavek, J. N., Ukrainetz, T. A., Eisenberg, S. L., & Gillam, R. B. (2006). The index of narrative microstructure: A clinical tool for analyzing school-age children’s narrative performances. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 15(2), 177–191.

Reese, E., Yan, C., Jack, F., & Hayne, H. (2010). Emerging identities: Narrative and self from early childhood to early adolescence. In K. McLean & M. Pasupathi (Eds.), Narrative Development in Adolescence. Springer.

Stein, N. L., & Glenn, C. G. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In R. O. Freedle (Ed.), New Directions in Discourse Processing (Vol. 2). Ablex.

McCabe, A., & Rollins, P. R. (1994). Assessment of preschool narrative skills. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 3(1), 45–56.

MindWing Concepts. (n.d.). Story Grammar Marker. https://mindwingconcepts.com