This is my first year homeschooling and I am very excited about it. I am getting a little nervous. My son is nine and was diagnosed with ADHD. He is on a first grade reading level and second grade math. Public school did a number on him. Any advise?
Get creative!!! "School at home" probably won't work. Play games. Read lots of books. Do hands on stuff.
Ds4 had a terrible time with traditional methods. Math worksheets freaked him out. 20 problems?! He couldn't do alllll those!!! But he could quickly rattle off facts if it was a game.
He also had trouble with reading story books. Too many pictures that were distracting. So I wrote stories for him. Later, he would draw a picture and write a "story".
At 11yo, he's doing better. Maybe almost "normal". We're going to try more traditional methods this year and see waht happens.
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You have a choice. You can throw in the towel or you can use it to wipe the sweat off your face.
Be patient and consistent with him. Help him learn to focus on one thing at a time. Sit with him and work with him. Keep the lessons short and move onto another subject that is as different as possible from what he just did. Like poetry memorization to penmanship or spelling to math. As his focus and attention increases, increase the time spent on each lesson. These will be small incremental steps taken over a period of years. I have found that my children need my supervision to help them stay focused on their work. For a child this young who struggles with attention and hyperactivity, he needs direct supervision. My son especially has to have me in the room with him. It used to be so bad that he would wander off out the door and down the street. No kidding. He has gotten better, but I used to have to go looking for him if I took my attention off of him to work with someone else. It was nerve wracking to say the least. He can do a little bit of work himself now, but he still needs a lot attention. He will be ten in August.
Some children need to be very specifically taught how to focus on something that they are not particularly interested in. This is a very important skill. Explain to him that you are teaching him this and you need his co-operation. People who cannot pay attention have a hard time staying on task and finishing important tasks. It is much harder to try to cope as an adult than it is to be taught as a child how to pay attention and stay on task.
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My husband and I have a motto: We are the leader. We are one.
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