As students move through school, the executive functioning demands increase rapidly. Their school work will typically require stronger executive functioning skills, including planning, organization, task initiation, time management and other related skill areas. Without well-developed executive functioning skills, students may have difficulty excelling in school. Help your child develop stronger executive functioning skills with the ideas detailed below.
Visual Schedules
Children with executive functioning difficulties often become easily overwhelmed with a large workload and struggle to complete all the tasks they need to do in a given day. Help your child feel less overwhelmed and more in control of their day by creating a visual schedule. Start by creating a poster for morning tasks; list each item they need to complete when they wake up, such as brush their teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast, and put their belongings in their backpack, and draw a picture next to each item to visually display the task. You might even add check boxes next to each item for every day of the week so they can check off each item as they complete it. Create a similar checklist for tasks they might do when they get home from school, like have a snack, complete their homework, go to an activity, eat dinner, shower, and brush their teeth, along with the corresponding visual images. The more structure and order you can bring to your child’s day, the more you can improve their executive functioning skills.
Distraction-Free Workspace
It’s important that your child has a quiet, distraction-free workspace that they use each day for completing their homework. This might be a desk in their bedroom or even a spot on a communal table, like in a kitchen or dining room. Make sure they have all of the supplies they need for completing their homework, including pens, pencils, paper, highlighters, scissors, and so on. When the supplies run low, help your child re-stock them before they start their homework to ensure they don’t wander around your home mid-homework session searching for supplies. Also set a consistent homework time, which might be right after school or after a short snack or movement break. Try to make the time and space where your child completes their schoolwork as consistent as possible.
Time Management
Many students with executive functioning challenges struggle with time management. Help your child develop stronger time management skills with the ET/AT strategy, as follows:
Have your child choose one assignment to start with and ask them to predict how long they think it will take to complete that task, and write the ET, or estimated time. Then have them track how long it actually takes them to complete the assignment and write down the AT, or actual time. They should do this for each assignment, comparing the ET to the AT, and they will likely note that when they first start using this strategy, there will be a big difference between the ET and the AT. However, the more they practice this strategy, the more realistic they will become with their time and the more these times will start to merge.
Incremental Breaks
For children with executive functioning challenges, sitting for long stretches of time to work on homework can be extremely difficult and can feel overwhelming. As a result, they might do anything possible to avoid starting their work. Try an incremental break strategy, where your child sets a timer and works for 20 minutes, then takes a 5 minute break. Have them do this cycle three times: 20 minutes of work followed by a 5 minute break, then take a longer break, around 20-30 minutes, and then start that cycle again until they are done with their school work. This approach helps them chunk their workload into smaller increments so it feels less overwhelming and more manageable.
Working Memory
Working memory is an aspect of executive functioning that plays a role in many academic tasks. It involves one’s ability to hold and manipulate information in their mind, which can affect most aspects of school, including reading, writing, and math. You can help your child build stronger working memory skills by playing games! Try playing the game Memory, where you flip over a series of cards and each player has to match two of the same cards to make a match. This game requires your child to remember the placement of a previously turned over card while looking for a match. You can also play a family story telling game, where one family member starts a story and the next person repeats what was already told in the story and then adds the next few lines, then moves onto the next family member, and so on. It’s a great game to play with friends as well!
Executive functioning skills become increasingly important as children move through school. Help your child develop stronger executive functioning skills with these ideas and they will be well on their way to success in school.
