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.
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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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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.
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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)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!
Filed under Learning problem, Reading | Comment (0)Teaching penmanship using large motor skills part 1
It took me a while to write this up because I wanted to take pictures of this 6 years old boy that I have started tutoring in September 2007. He is going to be the case study of how you can train penmanship using large motor skills.
(I did not show the child this sheet, some of you who knows Montessori well enough would know it’s not Montessori to “mark” the sheet or “correct” the answers.)
He has been to preschool since 3 years old, he cannot read and the above is what he had written down when I dictated 20 out of the 26 letter names. So, his problem is much more serious than the normal uncertainty of whether there are two or one “f” in Differin.
You would have expected most children to know how to write out the 26 letters from memory (without looking) since they have been writing don’t know how many worksheets. You will be surprised. It is quite common for children who have written hundred pages of handwriting practices and could not write a-z from memory. One of the things that went wrong was: the children were just copying the letters as pictures and there were no muscle memory and automaticity.
We want to train their muscles to remember because if they spend too much time trying to recall the picture memory of the letters, they would end up spending all their energy on that and none left to remember what they are writing.
Filed under Learning problem, Pre Writing Exercises, penmanship | Comment (0)How proper phonics instruction help children to spell?
I dictated 20 words, basically finger spell the words i.e. /k/ /a/ /n/ for can, the dictation process is to help children learn to associate the sounds and their symbols, train their ears to listen, and think to spell, instead of memorizing the whole word as an entire picture.
Compare the work of a 12 years old and a 6 years old.
Joel is 12. Noor is 6.
Noor came to me 4 months ago, have been attending kindie for 2 years, couldn’t read a word in English, couldn’t understand my instruction in English. I had to talk to her in Malay to stop her from crying. For a 6 years old, she did pretty well in this dictation, didn’t she?
Joel joined in last month, his English teacher complaint that he couldn’t spell “fish” and scolded him for being lazy. He has very short attention span, wondering eyes and low self-esteem, failed most subjects in school regularly. I suspect he may have attention problem or learning difficulty or could be just have poor instruction from his kindie years. I gave him a diagnostic test when he joined, he scored 1 word out of 50 words, the score just indicated that he couldn’t spell at all. He probably has poor visual memory and couldn’t store much images of whole words in his long term memory. I have no doubt he would have trouble reading a las vegas strip map as an adult without remedial work.
After joining the class 5 times, he knew the sounds of phonograms A-Z and a couple of the multi -letter phonograms. Though he mixed up the vowels a lot and is still developing his instant association of sounds and symbols.
In today’s dictation, even though I gave him the clue that /p/ /e/ /t/, the /e/ is the first sound of /e/ /E/ (letter e), he still wrote down /p//a//t/. He is going to be challenging, but also the kind of student that need much help to learn to spell and read. I am not so optomistic his parents will be patient to see him building proper foundation and improve from there though.
It’s very sad to see parents placing more emphasis on exams/tests and UPSR than the fact that their 12 years old couldn’t spell, read nor write. I have a couple of kids like this last year, just when they started to get a hang of things and started to “get it” after 5-6 months, their parents pulled them out of the SWR class, because their test scores in school hadn’t improved.
Another girl I had, she came to me at the end of her kindie year, couldn’t read nor spell after staying in the same kindie 8 a.m - 6 p.m since she was 2 1/2 years old. She obviously has attention problem and couldn’t sit still, she showed a lot of reversal problem i.e would write top as pot, map as pam.
Nevertheless, she is a very intelligent girl, she knew all the letter sounds of A to Z within 4 weeks, I only spent 10-15 minutes doing lesson with her every week because she just refused to stay on her chair after the 10-15 minutes, so I let her play with the practical life activities I have.
After 3 months, she just told her mother than she thought she could read the sentences we had for dictation. Her mother must have been doubtful, so she wanted to show off to her mother by reading the sentences I wrote on the white board when she came to pick her up. Her mother was really impressed. Her mother also told me that school had aways been a drag but she was a little puzzled what did I do with her daughter that make her so eager to come to my class and was always reminding her in the morning though our session didn’t start till evening.
Of course I skipped the part that her daughter was “playing” for 45 minutes and only had lessons for 15 minutes.:-)
Actually, the girl’s concentration has improved a lot as her self esteem was boosted and for the first time, words make sense! Then, she started year 1. So her mother decided to quit this not so relevant class because she wanted to send her to a couple of other tuition classes and time runs out. I felt sad, but there is really nothing I can do to convince these parents that basic skills like spelling and reading are more important than doing the same question 101 ways so that they can score in their tests.
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