Phonics-helping Children With Attention Problems

The following strategies are offered for enhancing attention and managing attention issues. This listing is by no means exhaustive, but is meant as a place to start. The best resources for strategies are the creative, inventive minds of enlightened assessment professionals, teachers and parents, in partnership with the scholars they serve. Together they can generate multiple alternative strategies.

1. Take the Mystery Away

The first and possibly most important management strategy is to insure that all students understand how attention works and identify their particular profiles of attention strengths and weaknesses. Then, students ought to be taught attention management strategies.

2. Understand Consistent Inconsistency

Teachers and parents ought to understand that the inconsistency of babies with attention issues is not facts of a poor attitude or lack of motivation. It is an element of their biologically based attention dysfunction, and is beyond their simple control.

3. Explore the Option of Medication

For plenty of babies and adolescents, medication can be helpful in dealing with attention difficulties. Medication can improve mental alertness and the intensity and period of concentration. In addition, it may diminish impulsivity and hyperactivity. The student and his parents may require exploring this option together with his physician. Proper evaluation is important. Some times good nutrition and vitamins can help resolve some of the deficiencies

4. Permit for Movement and Breaks

It is helpful for students who have issues with inconsistent alertness and mental work to be provided with opportunities to move around. For example, at school, teachers could ask the student to erase the board, collect papers or take a message to the office. At home, parents and/or the student could schedule regular breaks and modify work sites. That is, the student could work several minutes at the kitchen table and several minutes on the lounge floor. Each time the location is changed, the student may experience a burst of mental energy. Additionally, students may require being doing something with their hands while seated. They may doodle, roll a piece of clay or perform some other manual tasks that enhance their alertness and arousal.

5. Vary Instructional Strategies

Teachers ought to make use of a variety of instructional strategies and these ought to be changed about every 15 to 20 minutes. For example, they could deliver information for 15 minutes by lecture. This strategy could be followed by little group work or cooperative learning for 20 minutes. Next, students could engage in individual seatwork or watch a video. The use of learning tool like Phonics for Reading and learning can help.