Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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219 practices

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Choose the subtests that answer the question you were actually asked, and read whatever reports the family already has before adding anything of your own. Children arrive with thick folders, and they also arrive with nothing at all.

Where occupational therapy, speech and language or neuropsychology have already covered ground, do not cover it again for the sake of a complete…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 20:26One line of research

When you explain executive function to parents and teachers, four words will do: attention, reasoning, speed, memory. Each one can be worked on, and four is a number people can still repeat at the school gate a week later.

The academic models have a dozen headings and nobody outside the field retains them. A short list gives parents something to hang observations on, so…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 2:31One line of research

Two referrals turn up again and again. A young child being asked to leave a school for behaviour, with no developmental or cognitive information anywhere in the file. And a parent saying something is wrong while the school says everything is fine. Both are describing adult frustration rather than a formulation.

In each case the first job is the same: get some data. Not another opinion, not another meeting, but something measured about how this child thinks…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 17:36One line of research

If a practice looks pointless, you will have dropped it by Thursday. Before you take on anything new, get clear on what it is meant to be building in you.

Ask for the mechanism in one plain sentence: this repeated thing grows that capacity. Write it somewhere you will actually see it. When the practice…

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

Working with anger

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 53:39One line of research

Your brain is expensive to run and it spends where it is used. What you stop practising gets quietly defunded.

This is the honest reason to keep a skill going after it has started working. The month you feel calm is exactly the month the practice looks…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 35:29One line of research

Rehearsing a calmer response is not thinking about change, it is the change. Each repetition makes that route slightly quicker to reach for.

Which is why tiny reps are worth doing at all. A single rehearsal on an ordinary Tuesday does not feel like anything, and that is fine, because the…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 99:7One line of research

The old angry route does not get deleted. What you are building is a rival route beside it, and at the start the new one is small.

Expect the old path to show up when you are tired, ill or caught off guard, because it is still there and it is well worn. That is not proof the work…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 11:115One line of research

There is an old story about two wolves fighting inside a person, and the winner turns out to be whichever one gets fed. It is only a story, but the arithmetic in it is right.

Feeding here means whatever you actually rehearse: the conversation you replay at two in the morning, the reply you draft and delete, the grudge you…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 2:148One line of research

Resolving harder is not a plan. What protects you in a hot moment is a skill you have already practised and a situation you have set up in your favour.

Willpower is at its thinnest exactly when you need it most: late, tired, hungry, already provoked. So do the work earlier, where it is cheap. Decide…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 3:200One line of research

Ask them something you do not already know the answer to.

Today, ask your spouse one question you cannot predict the answer to. Not "how was your day." Something like: what are you quietly worried about this…

Five minutesKnowing your partnerCoreQur’an 30:21Seen more than once

Name their three current worries to yourself, then gently check whether you were right.

Knowing what weighs on them today is how care becomes specific instead of general.

Five minutesKnowing your partnerCoreQur’an 4:19Seen more than once

Learn how they were comforted as a child.

How someone was soothed long ago still shapes what feels like love now.

Five minutesKnowing your partnerCoreQur’an 30:21One line of research

Most children do not pick up reading by sitting near books. Around a fifth need very structured, repetitive teaching before it clicks, and about half of the rest still need a good deal of deliberate instruction, so structured teaching is the ordinary case rather than a special measure.

It helps to stop asking who qualifies for help and start asking how much teaching each child needs. A child left to fail badly enough to earn support…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 96:5One line of research

When reading results lift across a whole state after every teacher is retrained, the lesson is uncomfortable and hopeful at once. A good part of what looks like children failing is teaching that has not caught up yet.

One state moved from flat to clearly improved reading in years when many others slipped, and what changed was not the children but how teachers were…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 22:78One line of research

Speech arrives on its own if a child is spoken to. Reading, writing and arithmetic do not, and it is no failing that they have to be taught piece by piece.

Children absorb talk from the people around them without lessons. Print is a much later invention and the brain has no ready made place for it, so it…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 96:4One line of research

When a child keeps failing at a task, try reducing what it demands of attention and memory before you increase the practice. Shorter steps, one instruction at a time, the working written down where they can see it.

Attention, holding things in mind and switching between steps all set a ceiling on how much of a lesson gets through. You cannot easily raise that…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 2:286One line of research

Pouring more in does not help while the lid is still on. A child who is exhausted, wound up or not yet settled will keep very little of the lesson, however good the lesson is.

Do the settling first, even when it costs ten minutes of the hour. Sleep, food, movement and a calm start look like the soft part of the day and they…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 20:114One line of research

A child working words out from the pictures and the shape of the sentence is guessing well, not reading yet. It usually holds up until around the third year of school and then gives way, because the pictures stop and the words get longer.

Ask to hear the child read something with no illustrations and no predictable pattern. That is where you find out whether sounds and letters have…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 96:1One line of research

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…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 2:185One line of research

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…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 2:31One line of research