Best after school activities for children with ADHD part 2
If you have not read the part 1 of Best after school activities for children with ADHD, you may want to read that first.
Joining a drama or acting club will enable your child to able to act out different characters and scenes, it is a terrific outlet for a child with ADHD to learn to manage his emotions. Art and music are also two great ways to help your child express himself. You just have to remember that it’s not about how well he draws, sings, or plays an instrument; the most important thing is that he gets a chance to practice expressing himself.
knitting, cross stitching or sewing will be excellent in helping the ADHD children with his attention span and ability to focus.
Filed under Learning problem, Parenting | Comment (1)Best after school activities for children with ADHD part 1
Children with ADHD have the need to immerse themselves in an activity with intensity, martial arts meet that need because they require intensive mental and physical involvement. On top of that, martial arts also provide clear rules and directions, positive role models, and peer interaction, some of the skills that children especially those with ADHD need to develop.
Scouting has elements that help the child to focus, provide a lot of physical stimulations and has highly structured activities that catered to different learning styles. It’s probably one of the best activities currently available for boys and girls with ADHD. There are consistent peer interaction within close adult supervision, competition, and, most of all, fun, which really make scouting an effective ground for children with ADHD to develop certain life skills that may not come easy otherwise. But, you must have scout leaders who are trained or are willing to work with children who have ADHD.
Swimming which requires physical effort and concentration is also an excellent activity for children with ADHD, furthermore children usually see it as a fun activity.
Baseball, basketball, football, soccer — nearly any team sport that’s highly physical and requires total involvement can be a good choice for your child. Team sports offer him a chance to learn social skills and be around peer models. An individual sport like golf may not be too suitable in that sense. Some more a set of Ping Golf junior set cost more than two hundred bucks. :-) However, make sure he finds a sport he’s really interested in because learning the rules, taking turns, and cooperating with other kids can be difficult.
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Hope it’s not too late to jump on the wagon?
Though this blog was started last year and have gained a pagerank of 2 for a while, I have resisted doing paid reviews on it for the past half a year. I am not too sure whether I am committing “blogicide” by jumping on the wagon at this time!
Many of my friends on MSN have started to jump off the wagon and quit writing paid posts recently. They have to quit because granny G smacked their blogs and reduced their page ranks to big fat zeros and thus not many opportunities to write about drug rehabilitation or drug rehab anymore.
Do you believe in “no risk no gain”? Is it worth taking the risk of losing the page rank 2 ? We are willing to take the risk because we need the Greebacks. We need a lot of it for the pending move to IL and for the laparoscopic surgery that I will be going through in two weeks time. We also need it to get furniture and fix up the apartment where we are going to share our lives.
Since we are going to spend some of our saving for the surgery, we need to replenish our emergency fund too! It’s always good to have a little more emergency fund to fall back on. We wouldn’t want to get into a financial crisis while we are trying to settle down. I am just grateful that my blogging obsessions that started as a hobby can be a source of income before I get a “real” job.
Filed under buzz | Comment (0)Worst after school activities for children with ADHD
Watching excessive television especially a lot of violence and advertisements can hurt a child with ADHD. There children are ill-equipped to filter through messages to choose which to pay attention to. Most of all, plugging in the HDMI wall plate and start watching television after school is a passive activity, it takes time away from activities that can help to develop learning skills and social interaction. And from physical activities that children need to grow into healthy adults.
Research shows that video games reduce baseline brain activity in children with ADHD, causing them to continue to seek the reward of doing well in the game to compensate for the diminished dopamine levels in their brains that give them a sense of well-being. This may explain why some children with ADHD often become addicted to video games and have trouble stopping it.
In fact, any game or activity that involves long periods of inactivity, or a long sequence of steps to complete, can be tough for children with ADHD who just don’t have the patience necessary to succeed at these games. Common examples include standing in long lines at amusement parks, complicated card and board games, or physically demanding games where your child is on one of many teams who must wait long periods of time before starting to play.
Filed under Learning problem, Parenting, learning | Comment (0)Spend time with your children
Are you one of those people who strive to have your floor crumb free, the kitchen sparkling, the bathroom smell heavenly, and the living room free of clutter? The truth is: if you were spending all your time scrubbing toilets and mopping floors, you would be missing out on the precious gift of spending time with your child. Children grow up so quickly, in a blink of an eye, before you know it, your children no longer want to spend time with you!
Do you find it difficult to balance between a clean house and spending time with your children ? If spending time with my child surpasses the cleanest intentions and you have the financial mean, outsourcing the regular cleaning tasks will be one of the solutions. Look into the yellowpages or do a little research online, you would find plenty of part time cleaning services available. You may even find some small business franchise that run franchise maid service in your locality!
However, bear in mind that with small children, your house will never be clean. A quote that I once stumbled upon said “Cleaning the house while children are growing … is like shoveling the driveway before it stops snowing”. See, small children and a clean house are exclusively independent! A spotless home you may not have, but do you know of any parents with adult children who said “How I wished I have spent more time cleaning the house when they were young” ?
Filed under Parenting | Comment (0)After school activities for children with ADHD
Children with ADHD will usually need more time completing homework and household tasks; they may feel like they need to work all the time while other kids get to have fun. So, it’s important to have a balance of work and fun in their lives for their happiness and well being. Do not deny your child fun activities until his work is done. Sign him up for a weekly class or activity and make having some fun a priority in his life.
The best after-school activities for a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) make good use of his time, teach essential life skills, are educational, use surplus energy, are fun, and make him feel good about himself. Activities that are interesting to children with ADHD tend to be fun and meet their needs.
Children with ADHD often see and hear everything equally valuable and deserves the same amount of attention. These children have difficulty isolating single events from all the others in their environment. Many try to compensate for this barrage of stimulation by focusing on the loudest and most exciting. If you watch an ADHD child suft the channels, he will normally stop for the next action packed or attention grabbing comemrcials. Activities that are fast paced and exciting will be fun for them.
A hyperactive child feels driven to keep some part of his body moving all the time, so let him do it! Physical activities are essential to your child’s well being and also help his brain “normalize” in a way that allows him to focus, remain calm, and stay on task.
Filed under Learning problem, Parenting | Comment (0)Read aloud to your child and create phonemic awareness
Parent play an important role in instilling the importance of reading in daily life of their children. The best way to cultivate good reading habit is to start young and to find time to read aloud with your child every day.
Have lap time with picture books and stories, they can strongly motivate your child to enjoy reading. Try to make these books available for your children to explore and enjoy on their own as well. When reading aloud to your child, let your child open the book and turn the pages. Point to the words as you read. Draw attention to repeated phrases, inviting your child to join in each time they occur.
Learning doesn’t have to always be sitting down doing worksheet. One of the ways you can create phonemic awareness in a young child is to make use of printed words he encounters in his daily lives. As you run across letters and words in daily life, make an obvious effort to read aloud signs, billboards, notices, labels on cans, maps, postage tape and phone numbers. You want to say the sound of each letter of the word, for example, say “/b/-/a/-/g/” and then blend the three sounds to create the word. You may also want to draw attention to frequently occurring words as you read the signs with your child and challenge the child to read these words as they arise repeatedly. You can use your regular outings as a way to encourage reading by showing your child how printed words relate to daily living!
Filed under Parenting, Pre Reading Activities | Comment (0)Vision problem affects reading
Reading is not just identifying letters and words, and “vision” does not just refer to mechanical seeing. If your children struggle with reading, it could be the first hint of a vision problem. In fact, many children who experience frustration with learning to read may have undiagnosed visual problem.
In an early stage, your child learns to attach meaning to what he sees.For example, your child learns to associate the smiley face drawing with his idea of a human face and the feeling of relationship, the smiley face is just lines and dots on a page without such association.
If you see some of this red flags, you should consult a developmental optometrist to find out the potential issues that could interfere your child’s ability to read:
(1) the child cannot associate the shapes he sees with a meaningful idea or memory
(2) some of the mechanical skills that eyes use to collect information are not working quite right
(3) the child doesn’t “see” the same images other children see i.e. he cannot tell the difference between a “d” and a “b” and a “p” and a “q”.
(4) the child cannot consistently “read” from left to right, or he cannot track to the next line on a page.
Some children may merely have fuzzy focus, instead of going out to get a new table lamp, the problem might be corrected with glasses. Some may have mechanical visual issues as a result of the way their eye muscles work independently and/or together. Whereas some children have difficulty reading because they have perception difficulties –what they see does not “mean” the same to them as what other children see.
If your child seems to be having a hard time learning to read, before you further frustrate him with more homework, a trip to a developmental optometrist might be needed. It’s more than just evaluating your child’s performance on the 20/20 eye-chart, a developmental optometrist who understands the development of vision may suggest eye exercises or additional perception training that could make all the difference!
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