school

What To Do When They Just Can’t Sit Still

You know the type. You can easily recognize her in a classroom setting. The teacher’s talking, and he’s in constant motion. She’s drumming her fingers on the desk. His leg is bouncing up and down with a rhythm to match the tune in his head….except he doesn’t recognize that he’s moving.

The good news is that often, the wiggling and jiggling is an attempt to pay attention. The bad news is that the constant movement looks like distracting and annoying hyperactivity. Aside from starting gym class a little early, what can you do? Take a look at the following tried and true tips to help the ones you love who don’t love sitting:

1. Make a standing commitment. This idea worked very well for Kayla’s youngest son. When he had a task to do, he would stand at the table or desk to get things done. When he was sitting, he was distracted by all sorts of things, but standing up helped him focus on the task at hand. You may be interested in a standing desk. Or simply ask your favorite student to try standing up to work for a change; you may find it’s a simple idea that works.

standing desk recommended for adhd child — Standing Desk

2. Get on the ball. Three years ago, Robi Giuliano first encouraged her fourth grade students in West Chester, PA to take a seat on a yoga ball instead of a traditional desk chai. Guiliano never looked back: students who sit on inflatable bouncers can improve their focus while increasing their balance and core strength. “I have more attentive children, she said. “I’m able to get a lot done with them because they’re sitting on yoga balls.” Once they start sitting on a stability ball, they don’t usually want to go back to a stationary chair. The consequence of losing the privilege keeps students from “accidentally” rolling off the ball or engaging in other distracting horseplay. Sounds like a win-win situation to us! Get your balance chair for your ADHD child here.

balance ball chair for adhd — Ball Chair

3. Sit pretty anywhere. What if your fitness ball doesn’t reach your desk? Maybe your ball isn’t that tall. Or maybe you’d rather try a Fitball Seating Disk. Here’s a product that helps a student keep good posture and improve core strength, and it’s smaller and easier to move around. They can be used inconspicuously in a classroom, and are often part of an IEP or 504. Take a look at the seating discs here. Note that there are different shapes and sizes, and some come with sensory textures.

4. Change it up! My daughter’s choir teacher executes this idea brilliantly. She throws in an exercise when certain students’ attention started to wane. She might give them permission to stand up and stretch, or to turn around and speak 10 words to one person. An elementary school teacher might encourage kids to “shake their sillies out.” Sometimes a simple exercise can change things up enough to help a student regain focus.

5. Give a second choice. For some children, simply offering a different place to sit helps them focus again. Maybe one area is where a child listens better and another area is where she works better. Viva la difference!

How about you? Are you still sitting in the same place? Test some of these ideas for yourself and see if your focus is a little sharper. In the comments below, share your hear your own tried and true tips for jumpstarting your favorite student’s focus.

The PAC-kit – Our Planner for ADHD

We don’t talk a lot about the PAC-kit, but this is the time of year that we should! The PAC-kit is the Planner, Agenda, and Calendar that evolved from our attempts to keep Ron and Joe organized. We always found that store bought planners didn’t work for our guys.

Here’s what would happen.

It’s Tuesday night. Your son has a new $8.95 planner that you just bought because he lost the one he had before. You flip to today’s date. Nothing is written on it. He patiently shows you where he wrote his homework – on the wrong page. Because he couldn’t fit all the words onto the tiny lines, his assignments bleed over into the next day, but are still illegible.

So you call your next door neighbor, whose daughter always has her homework assignments done 15 minutes after she gets home. (Sigh.) You find out that there is a math worksheet, a chapter to read in Social Studies, ten spelling words to use in sentences, and a science activity that needs a pipette.

After a search, you find the math worksheet (what are ordinal numbers, again?) wadded down in the bottom of the bookbag with apple juice soaked into the corner. Your son brought home his science instead of Social Studies book. The list of spelling words is nowhere to be found. Nor is the pipette for the science activity.

Am I close?!

After years of struggling with all of the above, we invented the PAC-kit. Read about our planner for ADHD here!

Preparing for the SAT or ACT: A Guide for ADHD Students

The first time Joe had a College Board test – I think it was the PSAT – we didn’t know you needed to apply for testing accommodations. Joe went in expecting extra time, and he was unpleasantly surprised.

Today’s post is by Jenn Cohen, the self described ‘Chief Word Nerd’ of Jenn Cohen Tutoring. She has some invaluable tips to help you navigate the troubled waters of the SAT and the ACT. I wish I had read this a few years ago!

College admissions tests are a necessity for most college bound students, but just a mere mention of those three letters S-A-T can make kids (and parents) run for the hills. The urge to dash for the door may be even greater for ADHD students. Preparing for the test can be an overwhelming task, and applying for testing accommodations can be lengthy, expensive and unfortunately, unsuccessful.

Here are a few tips to get your college bound teen on the right track. Most importantly, don’t procrastinate! It’s tempting to stay in denial about the realities of test day, but starting early can make all the difference, especially for ADHD students. I encourage my tutoring clients to start prepping for the test a year before they plan to take the test. Yes, really.

As you already know, ADHD students need more time to complete school aassignments, and test prep is no different. To get in the same amount of practice tests and questions as typical students, ADHD students need to allow plenty of additional time. Ideally, ADHD students will start their SAT or ACT prep by the fall of their junior year at the latest. This allows time to not only get completely comfortable with the test, but it eliminates a lot of stress that comes with last minute cramming.

Another important reason to get an early start is to allow plenty of time to request test accommodations. A 504 plan/IEP may be sufficient to qualify for accommodations, but it may not. If your child is denied accommodations on the first request, you want to make sure you have enough time to gather and submit additional documentation. That may mean repeating any diagnostic testing. A good rule of thumb is that test results more than three years old should be updated. Talk to your child’s school counselor for more information about how to apply.

Before submitting your accommodations application, it’s important to develop an accommodations strategy, particularly if your student is opting for the SAT instead of the ACT. Extended time conditions on the SAT can be grueling at best, and counterproductive at worst. Carefully consider which accommodations will be most helpful, then request only those! I strongly encourage students to take a full-length practice test with accommodations to help determine which are necessary and which only make a long test even longer.

With that being said, the ACT is often a better choice for ADHD students. The accommodations available are more friendly to an ADHD student’s needs, and ACT, Inc. tends to be a bit more generous with awarding accommodations than the College Board. Read more about the ACT and ADHD.

As for the type of prep your student needs, the options are practically endless. However, ADHD students seem to have the most trouble with classroom preparation. That setting is distracting for typical students; for ADHD students, it can be a guarantee of getting little from the course. Better options are independent self-prep or working with a tutor. Tutors are ideal for ensuring accountability, working through tough questions and remediating skills that students may never have fully grasped in school.

The SAT and ACT don’t have to be a nightmare. With planning and an early start, college admissions tests are entirely manageable, if not fun! OK, I lied about that last part, but seriously, just think about the tests as speed bumps on your way to college. Every student who wants to go to college can get there.

Jenn Cohen is owner of Jenn Cohen Tutoring and President and Chief Word Nerd of Word-Nerd.com, an SAT vocabulary website. She specializes in tutoring ADHD students for SAT, PSAT and ACT. You can find her on Twitter @satprepforadhd and @SheldonWordNerd.

Adding the Big C to ADHD

To succeed, a child diagnosed with ADHD-inattentive needs the best of two worlds: home and school. Good communication between parents and teachers paves the way for a winning strategy for your child. Here are seven ways to improve two-way “reception”:

1. Meet early and agree on the frequency of meetings. Don’t wait until a problem presents itself. Be proactive and set up an appointment early in the year or semester to give the proverbial word to the wise. Think ahead about where your child is now and where you hope he is in 6 months. What are realistic goals? How can those goals be achieved? How often should you two meet?

2. Note this. The reality is that everyone’s time is limited, and we all need to be good stewards of scheduled time. If you’re considerate and write down the points you want covered in the meeting, you’re a few steps ahead of everyone else. You won’t be kicking yourself later for forgetting something important, and your child’s teacher will probably notice and appreciate your concise approach.

3. Sharing works two ways. You know your child’s history, tendencies, strengths and weaknesses like no other. While it’s true that you’re your child’s best advocate, don’t forget to listen. Your child’s teacher has insight into your child’s abilities and habits among others within a small group or classroom setting. She or he also may have the advantage of experience with other students with similar needs. What sorts of strategies have been successful in that experience?

4. How to initiate a running conversation. Between meetings, life marches on, and changes are constant. Ask the teacher what kind of communication works best for him or her. Does she email regularly? Would a home and school communication notebook be useful to him? What about the PAC-kit – the planner, agenda, calendar that worked for our boys. During our children’s middle school years, email was a terrific way to communicate. If something huge at home is happening — whether it’s a new baby sister on the way or a piano recital or a volleyball tournament — give the teacher a head’s up. If you need to change medications or stop medication for a time, share that information with your teacher as well.

5. Accentuate the positive. it’s tempting to only speak up when there’s a problem. When something is working, by all means, let the teacher know. We all could use more good news in our lives. Even when there is a problem or concern, the circumstances can be presented without casting blame. The last thing you want to do is force a defensive position from the person whose support you seek.

6. Be consistently consistent. Children and teens with ADHD respond well to structure and consistency. When parents and teachers can employ similar methods at home and school, the child’s successful efforts can be rewarded when specific short-term and long-term goals are met. Think about the appropriate rewards for both types of successes that will motivate.

7. Call in reinforcements. If communication with your child’s teacher does not prove fruitful and your best efforts fail, it’s time to solicit help at the school’s office. During Lesley’s 7th grade year, a new speech therapist was hired at our school. She ended up being our very best advocate, and her intervention made a world of difference. If you feel like your child’s needs are not being addressed, take your questions to the next level. A guidance counselor or an assistant principal may be your best support.

Back to School…and Reading Lists

Lesley and Mike have gone back to school, and each of them has a reading list that is longer than they would like. Lesley had a summer list, so she got a head start. Mike had his list this summer, too. But…well. Let’s not chalk everything up to being of the male persuasion…

Both Lesley and Mike are having to read classic titles that make me think of Mark Twain’s definition: “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” We’ve taken two effective approaches to slogging through these books.

First on the list is reading aloud. One of Lesley’s assignments was Siddhartha by Hermann Hess, a book offering insight into the spiritual journey of a young Nepalese man. Easily picked up from the local library, we realized that reading it proved more difficult. So we settled on reading aloud to our favorite 15 year old.

It ended up being a nice part of our day, either in the early afternoon or evening, as we were settling down. I would stop along the way and ask her questions to see if she was “with me” and not zoning out. That activity kept us both engaged. We applied some of Siddhartha’s soul-searching questions to our own beliefs – how are we similar? How are we different?

Finding Zen and the Art of Archery was a bit more challenging in our neck of the woods, but we discovered it at a larger chain book store in a larger nearby town. We managed to successfully procrastinate reading this one for various reasons until we were trapped in a van on the way to Olivia’s university. My husband was the driving force (both literally and figuratively) for the Nike-inspired decision to just do it. Thanks to his insistence and gracious chauffeuring, I started to read aloud again.

We took breaks and talked about what we were reading between passages. My husband gave us great compare and contrast questions to keep us focused. We stopped for soft serve ice cream, and before we knew it, we had finished this fairly short little book – and enjoyed it.

Reading aloud also works for non-ADHD children. Last winter, Olivia was really sick with an upper respiratory bug of some sort. She also had required reading – Jane Eyre – and a lot of time to read. Since she didn’t feel like it and seemed to welcome the idea, I read parts of the book to her. It was a few weeks into her semester that she remarked to me how grateful she was for that time. She felt that Jane Eyre would have been difficult to read in spurts, and that she had a much better understanding of it due to our reading it through in a few relaxed consecutive sittings.

Of course, reading aloud to our kids isn’t always possible – and shouldn’t be something they rely on 100%. That brings us to Mike. We’ll talk about how he is meeting his reading list challenge in our next post…

ADHD and Homeschooling

This week we have a guest post by Shannon Stoltz. Shannon homeschools her four children, and she’s got great insight about homeschooling, especially homeschooling kids with learning challenges. She almost (but not quite!) makes me want to go back and homeschool my boys!

“You should just put them in school. It’s a lot less work for you,” a well meaning friend told me years ago, after I shared a few of the challenges I was trying to work through with my older two children, who at the time were 7 and 5.

I just looked at her like she was crazy. I still shake my head when I think about it.

You see, we made the choice to homeschool before we even have kids, but as our four kids have grown, I am so glad we made that decision. Every time, I even start getting tired and weary, I think of all the work that would be involved advocating and seeing to their needs in a school setting and know that we made the right choice.

And if you have kids in school right now, you know what I mean. I get a glimpse of it every year when I go in with my younger son for his ARD meetings for the after school speech therapy services he recieves. The meetings, the paperwork, the continual communication with all the individuals involved to make sure he has the right services and adaptations – oh my.

When I interviewed Kayla in September, I had to smile when she said she was her boys’ teachers’ “new best friend” – communicating daily and staying involved, advocating for her boys.

As a homeschooler I’m freed up from all that time and energy spent advocating for my kids in the school system, and can simply focus on parenting and educating my kids to adulthood.

Don’t get me wrong. Homeschooling is not a magic bullet. It doesn’t lessen the coaching, facilitating, or parenting responsibility involved with raising kids. And it certainly doesn’t take away ADHD and other special needs.

Homeschooling just allows us to bypass the bureaucracy, and work with the kids at their pace, and coach them through the situation and equip them for the situations that they encounter in daily life.

My older son, J is now eleven and just as distractible as he was when he was five. But, he now knows that if he can’t concentrate to go seek out an environment where he can. In fact just before I was writing this, I found him at the top of the stairs writing. When I asked why he was sitting there, he said it was a comfortable quiet spot where he could concentrate. Okay, that works for me.

J is also the one who can and will lose just about anything. Don’t even get me started on shoes… So I am thankful that we don’t have to worry about getting homework to and from school, much less done. Instead we have created a system that he uses to keep track of his materials – most of the time.

Homeschooling allows him to finish up the work of school, and focus on things he wants to focus on. We’ve found that given the time and freedom, he is able to focus for long periods of time, on things that interest him. And that we want to encourage, as it will help him find his place in the adult world when the time comes.

And that’s just J.

Z, my 9 year old son is so active that while doing speech impairment testing at the local public school, the school officials just handed me a handful of information on ADHD. But because we can incorporate movement into his learning and give him huge amounts of time outdoors, we don’t have “classroom” issues with him needing to move and be active. Instead we just incorporate it into his day.

Now I know there’s an argument that children need to learn to sit still. And yes, there is a time and a place for that. But the reality is that not all jobs are desk jobs, and more than likely my boys in particular aren’t going to be attracted or be the best for desk jobs. They like being outdoors and active. So, encouraging them to find their gifts and skills within that works for me. They are still learning and growing, and becoming functional people.

I admire those of you who are navigating the school system, and advocating for your children. But if you are considering homeschooling, please know it is not only a viable educational option, it is also one that is an amazing journey and one that lets you get to know your kids on a level that’s just not possible when they are gone for hours each day.

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