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
5 practicesThe word one does several jobs at once: a digit, a number, a single object, a whole set. A child who has not sorted those out will put figures in the wrong columns and later read a third as a number instead of a part of something.
When digits land in the wrong place, check whether the child knows what is being counted before calling it carelessness. Say the unit out loud: one…
Before drilling number facts, check whether the child has any feel for how much a number is. Which pile is bigger, is eight nearer to ten or to two, give me three of those.
A child with no sense of quantity can still learn to recite that seven and eight make fifteen, and it will be a string of sounds attached to nothing.…
Patterns sit underneath both reading and arithmetic. Blue, red, green, blue, red, green: making a sequence, copying it, then breaking it on purpose builds the ordering that words and numbers both run on.
Use blocks, beads, claps, a drum, anything with an order to it. Ask the child to make the same pattern, then to spoil it deliberately and tell you…
Find something the child already loves, a team, an orchestra, a game, and lay their results over it. These players are strong, these ones need coaching, and none of it means the team is no good.
Feedback lands very differently when the low scores are players who need training rather than facts about who someone is. Do it with their own…
Ask a struggling ten year old what division actually is and you will often get a blank, or a method with no meaning under it. Going back to what each operation does is usually worth more than another go at this term's work.
Division is sharing out, or taking the same amount away again and again until nothing is left. Multiplication is that same amount repeated. Children…