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The Secrets to Raising a Smarter Child
- By Inderbir Sandhu, Ph.D

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Focus and Concentration in Children - Various Techniques to Motivate Children to Learn in an Effective Way

By Andrew Loh



Here are some more tips and techniques to teach your children how to focus and concentrate. Make sure to use them at an appropriate combination that you can train them at the optimum best.

Teach Them How to Meditate

Meditation could act as a great tool to promote focus and concentrate. Meditation is a mental exercise that seeks to calm down mind, relax it and develop concentration to focus on a particular image. Meditation also removes tension, stress and internal pressure. Teaching meditation to children could be difficult at first because they can sit tight in one place for more than few minutes. However, it is still good to sit in one place and mediate to gain the power of concentration in a gradual manner.

Take Some Time off Every Day and Visit a Place that Helps Children to Concentrate

It is better to take time off from home to visit a place that can act as a relaxation point. A silent park without human noise could be a very good place to start. Park and nature laces where children can hear just the call of birds, animals and nature is the best place that can actually help children develop focus.

Play Soothing Relaxation Music at Home

Children need some free time that can provide them relaxation and peace. Bring home music that your children like and adore to listen excepting loud and blaring one that can be nuisance and act as distracting mechanisms. Nature music, call of animals and birds, smooth and lively cartoon numbers, themed music and light melodies are the most preferred ones that can actually help creating an ambiance suitable for focusing.

Introduce Healthy Lifestyle

Good nutrition, good night's sleep, optimum physical exercise and evening playtime are essential to develop a healthy mind. A healthy mind can easily focus and concentrate on anything while a mind that is happy and contended act as a precursor to develop enthusiasm for studies. A good diet contains plenty of carbohydrate, fat and protein along with enough quantities of vitamins and minerals.

Play Chess

Chess is a game of kings and king of games. Chess is also a game that develops focus and concentration. Its complex, permutation and combination helps mind to learn many cognition techniques required to perform well in the classroom. Playing chess in the morning may help children a lot because their mind is fresh and agile in the morning. Chess also helps develop the time span through which one can retain focus and concentration for more time.

Green Board Game

Make a rectangle sized cardboard and draw a big circle in the middle. Fill the circle with deep green colour. Hang the board on a wall and ask children and to sit in front of it for some time. Also, instruct them to focus their mind on the green circle for five minutes at least three times in a day. Green is a soothing and vibrant colour that can remove stress, worries and sadness. Instead, it can help children to develop focus and concentration in a gradual manner.

Play Dart

Dart board is also a great tool to develop focus. When children throw their dart after focusing on the bulls' eye, they are in fact developing focus and concentration. The eye line that connect the plane of eyesight and the bull's eye point of the board, acts as focal point of attraction.

Developing Reading Habit

Reading is a sure fire way to develop focus and concentration. When someone reads a book, he or she will be immersed in the content of the book and understanding the meaning of the story. When children read a story book, they would also be extending the time span to understand the storyline. Let the books purchased be simple to read and understand. Books of riddles, puzzles and problem solving are the most preferred while girl children might need cartoon, fictional, Barbie like stories to develop focus. The more children read more will be the power to retain focus and concentration.

Avoid Disruptions

Never ever, interrupt your children when they are working on their class homework or project work. Set a rigid rule that no one will interrupt or disturb children who are working or concentrating.

Ask Children to Stop Multitasking

Children are known to be very fickle minded who are easily disturbed. Some children watch TV when they are doing their homework. Similarly, some other children may like to fiddle with a cell phone or play games on it. Make sure that you are not allowing them with these distracting activities. Children are incapable of concentrating on two different tasks at the same time.

Help Children With Their Scrapbooking and Crafting

Let children get active with scrapbooking and crafting because these activities need reading through directions, instructions and follow individual steps to complete projects. In addition, when children do their scrapbooking and craft work, they would also be developing the power of concentration, step by step and in an orderly manner.

Featured Resource

Focusing and Calming Games for Children: Mindfulness Strategies and Activities to Help Children to Relax, Concentrate and Take Control
By Deborah M. Plummer

Focus, mindfulness, relaxation and concentration are key elements of achieving emotional well-being, and are also important for a child's development of skills and abilities. "Focussing and Calming Activities for Children" helps children to build social, emotional and spiritual well-being. Part One covers the theoretical and practical background. It illustrates how the capacity to calm oneself, focus attention and concentrate can help a child build specific skills and abilities and regulate themselves, and demonstrates the importance of play and imagination. It also sets out how to structure the emotional environment.

Part Two is made up of games and activities that teach children how to develop these mindfulness and calming skills. The activities are suitable for use with groups and individual children aged 5-12, and can be adapted for children with specific attention and concentration difficulties and for older children. This is an ideal resource for teachers, counsellors, social workers, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, youth workers, parents, and carers.

 

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