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
4 practicesClapping 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…
When the usual route into reading or arithmetic does not form, children build another one, and it nearly always runs through memory. It works for years, and it costs far more effort than anyone watching realises.
This is the bright child who is somehow always tired, always slow with written work, quietly memorising what everyone else is working out. The route…