Category Archives: Executive Functioning Skills

ADHD and Handwriting: Part Two

What you need to know about ADHD and handwriting difficulties.

How To Teach Grade-Schoolers Organizational Skills…Starting With the Disorganized Desk

Having a disorganized desk can make school hard to manage.  When the teacher asks his or her students to take out their science books and turn to page 57, the child who is lost in their desk trying to find the book often can not remember the page number once it is found. Many times this student will remain lost in the lesson because of their fraught start.  Tasks that should be simple become overwhelming and time- consuming often leading to stress and frustration.  Organization can be an elusive skill that many kids struggle to acquire.  The fact of the matter is there’s a lot that goes into being organized.  Organization is part of a set of skills called executive functions.  Keeping a desk organized requires more than just putting things away.  Managing school materials requires planning, prioritizing, decision making, sequencing, task initiation, and following through with those tasks to completion.  Some kids need extra help to set up and maintain an organized desk space at school.  This post will focus on how to provide grade-schoolers with the support they need to establish and sustain a functional workspace at school.

9 Strategies to Increase Attention and On-Task Behavior

Above all, the most important thing needed for a child to progress with anything is focus. When presenting a child with a task, particularly a novel task, you must establish meaningful engagement with the child, in other words, where the child can focus on the task. What exactly does focus mean? The ability to sustain selective attention or concentration on the task at hand while ignoring or filtering out the non-relevant or distracting information in one’s environment. Sustained selective attention yields steady results on a task over time. For some children, often, this is very challenging.