Today started out like an ordinary Monday. My son after sleeping for twelve hours woke up horribly grouchy. First, he wanted cereal for breakfast, then he wanted left over pancakes. After I heated the left over pancakes he started crying because he wanted cereal. Momma doesn't play that way so he ended up having neither. So we both started out the morning grumpy. How is it, I thought, that he can sleep for twelve hours and wake up grumpy?
My next thought is do I want to stay home all day and try to come up with ideas for entertainment so I don't have to hear myself saying "No leave that alone, quit that, stop being mean to sister". No I decided I did not have the energy for that so we loaded up his bicycle and his sister and away we went in search of something cheap and fun.
We ended up at a little park that has quite an area of sidewalk where he could practice riding his bike. It also had a little playground too. I thought on a holiday we might encounter some other kids, but we had the place to ourselves.
We had a blast. He got lots of practice riding his bike, I got lots of power walking in to keep up. My daughter got some super fast stroller time. We also had a great time on the playground. Once we got back home everyone was tired, but in much better moods. So enjoy your kid time because it changes from minute to minute. Try to remember next time your kid is having a hard moment that it will be over before you can blink. As for me I am going to try to remember that next time I feel my blood pressure rise........maybe counting to ten does work. P.S. He ate a super big lunch!
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Monday, January 18, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
Children Who Struggle To Pay Attention and What You Can Do To Help Them
Does your child have trouble paying attention? Do you find yourself repeating directions over and over?Do you hear teachers saying your child has difficulty staying on task or following directions?
Being the mother of a very active four year old boy, I have heard and witnessed this behavior.
First, I do believe that this is normal behavior,especially for boys. I am not stressing out about this. However, if there are things I can do to help my son learn to pay attention it will save myself and his teachers some frustration.
Here are some fun ideas you can do at home that will improve listening skills. I found a cool website that had a lot of games to play with your kids. We modified it a little to work on listening skills.
Make A Trail of Shoes-
The game involves you using a laundry basket and all family members shoes.( you don't have to use all just some) You make a trail out of shoes and then gather them one pair at a time and put them in the basket. You can count how many pairs there are or gather them by color. We actually got a piece of paper and made a chart. Each family member had a certain color and we made marks for how many shoes each family member had. At the end we would see who had the most. Now here comes the paying attention part. When I explained the game to my son he got so excited that he would not be listening. First he started just grabbing shoes and throwing them in the basket.......wanting to get to the end of the trail to see where it went. I had to direct him to slow down and chart each pair of shoes on the chart. This meant he had to take time to look at the color of each person and mark the chart with the appropriate color. It was all he could do to slow down long enough to make those marks. I also told him from the beginning that he has to make sure he took the laundry basket with him as he moved. He would get so excited he would move on without it. I would say what did you forget? The first few times he would look around until finally he remembered to move it along with him. It was fun to watch him process.
Picnic Time
This was another really fun thing for us to practice his listening skills. We had an indoor picnic because the weather was so nasty. he was in charge of setting things out. I was very specific with my directions. I had him get out four pieces of bread. It took him a while to get the bread open and by the time he did in his excitement he had forgotten how many pieces I told him. Rather than just tell him I would have him think real hard. He remembered on his own. I asked him to put the bread one the counter when he was finished with it. He tried to put it in the pantry. I stopped him and asked him if that was where I had asked him to put it. He had to think before he finally remembered. Every time I explained why it was important to listen so you could follow directions. I had him set the tablecloth a certain way and put the food a certain way. I wasn't trying to drive him crazy, just get him to listen to what I would say. If he got it right at the first I would praise him for using his listening ears. He never got frustrated because he was so excited about the activity and it was a lot of fun for me as well.
In the future we will doing a lot of these type activities to help with his listening ears. I'll post on here if I start noticing whether his attention and listening skills have improved.
Being the mother of a very active four year old boy, I have heard and witnessed this behavior.
First, I do believe that this is normal behavior,especially for boys. I am not stressing out about this. However, if there are things I can do to help my son learn to pay attention it will save myself and his teachers some frustration.
Here are some fun ideas you can do at home that will improve listening skills. I found a cool website that had a lot of games to play with your kids. We modified it a little to work on listening skills.
Make A Trail of Shoes-
The game involves you using a laundry basket and all family members shoes.( you don't have to use all just some) You make a trail out of shoes and then gather them one pair at a time and put them in the basket. You can count how many pairs there are or gather them by color. We actually got a piece of paper and made a chart. Each family member had a certain color and we made marks for how many shoes each family member had. At the end we would see who had the most. Now here comes the paying attention part. When I explained the game to my son he got so excited that he would not be listening. First he started just grabbing shoes and throwing them in the basket.......wanting to get to the end of the trail to see where it went. I had to direct him to slow down and chart each pair of shoes on the chart. This meant he had to take time to look at the color of each person and mark the chart with the appropriate color. It was all he could do to slow down long enough to make those marks. I also told him from the beginning that he has to make sure he took the laundry basket with him as he moved. He would get so excited he would move on without it. I would say what did you forget? The first few times he would look around until finally he remembered to move it along with him. It was fun to watch him process.
Picnic Time
This was another really fun thing for us to practice his listening skills. We had an indoor picnic because the weather was so nasty. he was in charge of setting things out. I was very specific with my directions. I had him get out four pieces of bread. It took him a while to get the bread open and by the time he did in his excitement he had forgotten how many pieces I told him. Rather than just tell him I would have him think real hard. He remembered on his own. I asked him to put the bread one the counter when he was finished with it. He tried to put it in the pantry. I stopped him and asked him if that was where I had asked him to put it. He had to think before he finally remembered. Every time I explained why it was important to listen so you could follow directions. I had him set the tablecloth a certain way and put the food a certain way. I wasn't trying to drive him crazy, just get him to listen to what I would say. If he got it right at the first I would praise him for using his listening ears. He never got frustrated because he was so excited about the activity and it was a lot of fun for me as well.
In the future we will doing a lot of these type activities to help with his listening ears. I'll post on here if I start noticing whether his attention and listening skills have improved.
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