Make Your Child Smarter

How to keep a ADHD Child's Attention?

Q: I work in the school system, and deal with a fifth grade boy who has a very difficult time staying focused. He may have a problem with hyper activity and may have been on medication at one time, I do not believe he is now. I need any tips on how to help him to stay on task and help him to focus while at school and in class. Thank you very much.

A: Here are some things you can do to keep his attention:

1. You MUST be the most stimulating person in the class room. This means if you can make lots of facial expressions, become animated, change your voice and use lots of gestures. This will help keep attention on you.

2. Involve the students even physically. This may mean asking students to stand up for portions of class. For example you could make up a rhyme for someone point of rote memorization, teach it to the kids and ask them to stand up and sing it out loud. Although this is non-traditional, it will help get the kids moving, active and involved.

3. Find out what he has great passion about and use that to hook his interest. For example, in one classroom, a child with ADHD wouldn't do a word building exercise. After much time of frustration, the teacher asked the child what he loved to do. He said snow boarding and the teacher asked him to do the exercise for the word "snow." It worked!

4. Don't put too much time and energy into patching up weaknesses. I know one story where a student failed miserably in a class where the teacher focused on his inability to spell. When the next year's teacher allowed him to use a spell checker and allowed him to get out of his seat occasionally, he improved dramatically.

For much more information about the role of the entire education system and ADHD, you can look at my book, The Gift of ADHD for tips on how to make teaching relevant not just for ADHD children but for all your students!

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