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
3 practicesAsk someone to repeat a made up word and memory cannot rescue them. That is exactly why this small task keeps finding difficulties a clever, well practised person hides everywhere else.
Real words can be recalled, and a strong memory will lift a score without the skill underneath being there at all. A word that has never existed…
Phonological awareness is not one skill. Telling sounds apart, rhyming, breaking a word into its sounds and blending them back are separate jobs, and a child can be fine at one and stuck at another.
Before agreeing that a child needs phonics, find out which piece is missing. Ask them to say the sounds in cat, then to join up sounds you give them,…
A display organised by sound rather than by alphabet gives a child more to hold on to. Let them feel where each sound is made, lips, tongue, teeth, and match that to the letters that spell it.
Reading is learned from speech towards print, so a border running A, B, C tells a child very little about what they are actually doing. Grouping by…