Inattentive, distractible, restless and fidgety are probably the words you use to describe your child’s performance. Attention, Concentration, Following Instructions, Sitting Tolerance and Completion of Activities are the important pre-requisites essential for learning.
Here are some pointers to help you while planning activities to develop your child’s pre-requisites for learning.
What you should know:
The reason your child is inattentive, restless and distracted may be due to the excess energy within them. Therefore start off with some physical activities to burn this energy. The following activities can be tried out within the home:
• Create an obstacle course: climb up a few chairs crawl under the table and jump on a few pillows placed on the floor and you have an obstacle course within your house. Of course all this is done under careful supervision and ensuring that there are no bumps and falls along the way.
• Tidy up: along with expending energy, the activity teaches your child to be tidy. Have a toy box to collect all the toys. Place this in the middle of your living room and your child has to go and collect all the toys from every room (in trips) and put them inside the toy box. If you are using an old carton as a box, you can then ask the child to push them and place them in its appropriate place.
• Moving and shopping: Older children can perform this task. In movers, you can ask them to help you with re-arranging the furniture or putting them in its proper place. In shopping, children are given a bag and a list of objects they should search and find out. The list can include the items that is required in your table top activities (for example, stationary, school books, or jumble puzzles etc)
If the climate permits and it’s a bright and sunny day, have some outdoor fun with cycling, ball games, playing hide and seek, catch etc.
Tips for planning:
Any activity or games can be used to facilitate one or more of the necessary pre-requisite skill. However when planning these activities, the following points may be kept in mind, to achieve maximum potential.
Plan for short, success oriented tasks: In order to build interest and confidence in performance, it is important that the initial activities be short and success oriented. For example, if your child is easily distractible, a 2-3 piece puzzle with simple images is a better choice than a 6-8 or more piece puzzle.
Eye level: When interacting with your child, always sit at their eye level, as it encourages them to pay attention and develops eye contact.
Modeling and assistance: When teaching any task, remember that you need to first demonstrate the activity to the child. Also in the early stages, you may have to completely assist the child to perform the same. But as learning occurs, reduce the assistance provided (both physical help and verbal prompts), until the child is able to perform the activity by self.
Activity grading: Depending on your child’s performance increase the challenge, duration and frequency of the activity in order to stimulate progress. That is a child who can sit patiently for 2 min and completes beading 10 beads should be encouraged to bead 15 beads within a span of 3 minutes or more.
Reinforcements: Remember to reinforce your child positively when he succeeds. Initially when learning is taking place, you can reward your child continuously (i.e. for every successful behavior, reward your child). But with practice, slowly reduce the rewards to an intermittent system (i.e. for every 3 successful trial you reward your child). This way you can ensure that your child is not dependent on rewards alone.
Written by
Sarah Mary Joseph
Sr. Occupational Therapist
Prayatna, Centre for Child Development, Cochin.