Before I ask a child to attempt any specific movement, I am paying attention to their sensory state and their regulation, because trying to teach a skill to a dysregulated nervous system rarely works, regardless of how clearly the skill is explained or demonstrated.
This means the first minutes of a session are often not about the planned activity at all. I am observing whether a child seems overstimulated by sound, light, or the number of people in the room. I am noticing whether they need to move in an unstructured way first before any structured task makes sense to their body. Some children need quiet and stillness before they can engage. Others need to move vigorously first to discharge energy before they can settle into a more specific task.
None of this is guesswork I apply the same way to every child. It comes from watching a specific child, session after session, and building a picture of what their regulation actually looks like and what helps it. A strategy that calms one child might not work for another, and what worked for a given child last month might need adjusting this month as their needs shift.
I think this order matters more than people expect. If I introduce a movement task to a child who is not regulated, the session often becomes about managing resistance or distress, not about the skill I intended to work on. If I address the sensory and regulation piece first, the same movement task often becomes accessible in a way it was not a few minutes earlier, without needing to change the task itself at all.
This is also why I resist rigid session plans that assume every child arrives ready for the same sequence of activities. A plan is a starting point, not a script. If a child arrives dysregulated, the plan adjusts, sometimes significantly, before we get anywhere near the originally intended activity.
I try to explain this to parents directly, because it can look, from the outside, like very little happened in a session if a large portion of it was spent on regulation rather than a specific physical skill. I do not see it that way. Regulation is not preparation for the real work. For a lot of these children, it is a necessary and real part of the work itself, and skipping it in favor of the planned activity usually costs more time than it saves.