Speaking from personal experience, this author can tell
you that having an ADHD child in the classroom can be one of
life’s most difficult situations. ADHD children require a lot of
attention and constant supervision to be kept on task.
When there are several other children that need your
attention as well, it’s not always possible to focus enough
attention on that one student who is disruptive even when you
know you need to do exactly that.
An ADHD student is amazingly disorganized with papers
and school supplies bursting out of his or her desk. They can’t
sit still unless you have them entranced in the lesson,and they
are constantly interrupting you while you are teaching.
There are times when it literally takes every ounce of
patience you can muster up not to yell at the little angel at the
top of your lungs. The upside is that these kids can often be
real joys as well. They can be good workers, very funny, and
are often extremely personable.
The structured school classroom setting can be a
tremendous challenge for individuals who have difficulty sitting
still, being quiet, and paying attention to the right thing.
One of the worst parts of trying to educate an ADHD child
is keeping him or her on task to make sure he or she doesn’t
fall behind. Often these kids will “hit a wall” during the school
year.
Every week they just get a little farther and farther
behind, until they're so far behind that it's impossible to catch
up. They lose their homework assignments, even after they
have spent hours working on them. And they study hard for
tests only to perform poorly the next day. They just slip farther
and farther behind with each passing week.
ADHD is most often recognized and referred for treatment
in third grade. This is when elementary school kids most often
hit the "academic wall."
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1 comments:
October 10, 2008 at 6:09 AM
I can only imagine the frustration of having a classroom full of students to teach. I only have one student. My wife and I home school her 12-year old brother, Steven. He has ADD. We’re by no means experts in teaching, however we found an effective method that really grabs his attention when teaching him a variety of subjects. Instead of just reading information to him and having him read along, we stop at various intervals and draw sketches, related to what we are reading, on a whiteboard.
For example, I was reading him something which spoke about how humans have “free will”, the ability to choose what they want to do and to make decisions that positively or negatively affect their lives as well as the fact that they should assume responsibility for their actions. That’s a pretty dry concept for a kid with Attention Deficit Disorder. So I drew a stick figure picture of a person and then drew a robot next to it, along with a small remote control. Nothing fancy, but he could pretty much tell what it was (actually he thought the remote was a TV but I explained what I was trying to draw). Then I asked what you could do to the robot with the remote control. Steven quickly said that you could make it move or do other things. I asked if he could do that to the human. He said “no”. So I said “so is the human controlled by anything?” “No, they just do what they want to do”, he replied. “Exactly”, I said, “that is what is called free will.” Then I wrote “RIGHT” on one side of the stick figure person and “WRONG” on the other side, with arrows pointing to each. “So if he does right things or he does wrong things, who is responsible for what he does?” “He is,” Steven answered.
We do it with a lot of other things too. Recently we did it with each of us taking turns drawing a different block on a whiteboard “comic book” to teach safety around strangers.
He loves doing this. It holds his attention, which is a challenge in itself, and he remembers much more.
Perhaps this could also be done in a classroom setting, depending on how other kids without ADD or other learning differences respond to such a method.
---Kevin Broccoli, HomeSchooling ADD Kids blog: http://homeschoolingaddkids.com/blog/
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