Getting your child to “Pay Attention”
Attention is such a vague word. Often kids who struggle with it hear it about 500 x a day! People in their life say to them, “pay attention”, “focus”, “listen”, “are you listening”, “are you paying attention” ? No one truly asks the child with attentional issues what it means to pay attention. No one asks them if they truly know what it feels like. Children who seem to be scattered but seriously smart are often those with attentional issues. Their brains focus on different things all at once and don’t appear to the untrained eye to work hard or put forth good effort. Unfortunately this is usually farthest from the truth. Kids with attentional issues are trying very hard to pay attention; the problem is they are either spending so much time ignoring distractions to maintain focus or they are paying attention to EVERYTHING!
What does “paying attention” mean to you? At Success4School we define “paying attention” to mean ‘choosing to narrow one’s focus on one thing that is deemed important’. What does it look like? ‘The child’s body, face, eyes are focused on this one thing for a determined amount of time’.
The determined amount of time is built upon with each child. We help develop attention through many activities which also help other executive functioning skills such as working memory and processing speed, tuning out distracters, and maintaining eye contact. However when we asked 50 AD/HD children this month what it means to pay attention we got the most interesting responses. All of them sounded like they were reading textbooks. Then we asked them what it looked like to pay attention and only 3% could define this well enough to help someone understand them let alone themselves!
We teach four stages to developing deeper attentional skills- the skills to achieve “paying attention”:
1. Focus on Facial and Body Language-Speaking FOCUS
2. Active Listening- Zooming in
3. Working memory-Tapping into my memory bank
4. Saliency Perseverance -Developing Stamina in the Zone
We thought we’d post with a few activities you can do at home to develop the skill of paying attention. These strategies focus on the skill of what we at Success4School call, “zooming in”. These activities build listening skills, the first step in paying attention. Teaching a child what it means to LISTEN, is the first step to paying attention in a focused way for a more socially acceptable amount of time. Try some of these at home and start your child on the right footing towards learning to listen, helping them to develop one of the primary skills behind paying attention.
Activity 1: Back to back, I’m in the zone!
Sit flat on the floor with your feet out in front of you and have your child line their back with yours. You cannot see each other as you face opposite sides. Give your child a simple map. Provide it on a clipboard with crayons and be sure you have one too. Your child cannot talk or ask questions during the activity. He can clap twice for “I understand” and Once for “I don’t. Provide him or her directions to get to a location on the map without helping him or her using your body. You cannot move. You must use communication that is clear and he needs to listen and zoom in on your verbs. Place emphasis on the action/verbs you use in your directions. Embellish them only when he or she has success. For instance: “Pick up the red crayon”. Child claps twice to say they understand or child claps once to say they don’t. “Put the crayon on the house on Maple Street. It is the house with the number 504″, etc. You navigate your child to a location. Then reverse roles. This can be adapted to younger children by drawing a critter creature. The directions for making the creature are given by the speaking role.
Activity 2: I’m back from the zoo
This activity works on working memory and listening. The adult starts… “I’m back from the zoo; I saw a giraffe with a huge neck.” Then the child says, “I’m back from the zoo, I saw a giraffe with a huge neck and a gorilla with dark black fur… “Etc, each person adds an animal they saw.
Activity 3: Rule change
This activity also works to develop working memory, but a listening child who is engaged in active listening is needed here also. It also focuses on a kinesthetic strategy to engage the child in movement in learning. Try this activity with a timer to beat the clock once you’ve played a few times and you can work on processing speed as well. You will need letter tiles like from scrabble or banagram type games. Lay out the vowels on one side of the room and the consonants on the opposite side of the room. In advance prepare a set of three and four letter words which can be built and manipulated. For example, the word BUST can be manipulated to RUST, by making one change- b to r. You will be the caller first, and then you can reverse roles. The caller says build “bust” the child runs to one side of the room and grabs a U then brings it to the consonant side to build the rest of the word with it. The child builds bust and says “word”. Then the caller says “build a new word using bust and the letter r”. The child will continue this. Eventually letters will be mixed up at both sides of the room and the child will need to run back and forth. This is so much fun and the child builds valuable word building skills. You can adapt the words to the age of the child. You can also adapt the game to a younger age with numbers and letters, with a similar feel for letter and number identification. It can also be done with colored blocks and the caller calls out a pattern (only once), ex: red blue red ex. purple, gray yellow, blue.
More later ! Have questions, AskJill at Success4School-www.success4school.com
