Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD
Focus, starting, and ADHD
Most advice about focus is written for a brain that starts easily. This area is not. It covers what ADHD actually is, how to make a start when starting is the hard part, how to bring a future consequence close enough to feel, and how to stop paying for it in shame.
What works for this
Implementation intentions
Putting things off is mood repair rather than laziness: delay removes the bad feeling straight away and the cost lands later. So the move is not more willpower, it is a plan specific enough to run without a decision.
One move, today
Write one sentence: when it is [time] and I am at [place], I will [the first small action]. Naming when and where is the part the evidence supports.
What matches
6 practicesYou can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.
A child who drifts off topic, answers a slightly different question, or needs things said twice may not be avoiding you or daydreaming. The words may…
Clapping games, skipping rhymes and silly verses are worth doing. They are good for the ear and they cost nothing, but they will not on their own repair a reading difficulty, and it is kinder to say so early.
Play the games, and separately get the structured teaching that a child with a real decoding problem needs. Families are often told that rhyming…
Invent words together. Say a made up word, pull it apart into its sounds, put it back, then take one sound out and hear what is left. The nonsense is the point, because there is nothing for memory to fall back on.
With a real word, a child who cannot work with sounds can often get by on memory, and you learn nothing about what they can actually do. A made up…
Plenty of children read the equals sign as put the answer here. Write it the other way round sometimes, eight equals three plus five, so they meet the idea that both sides are simply the same amount.
Move the sign about. Leave the gap in the middle, four plus something equals two plus five, and watch what the child does with it. If they add…
Build numbers and break them up again. Seven is five and two, and also six and one, and a child who can see that has the thing mental arithmetic is made of.
Blocks, buttons, coins, anything you can push into two piles and back together. Ask which numbers fit inside other numbers and let the child show you…
In practice, you sometimes have to stop a child using the trick that has kept them afloat, so the weaker skill finally gets used. Expect them to hate it for a while.
If memorising is doing the work, the part that should be doing it never gets a turn. So build short pieces of practice where the workaround is simply…