dysTalk Helping Your Child At Home Concentration - Talks - dysTalk

About the speaker: Dr Valerie Muter is a consultant clinical psychologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital where she specialises in working with children with both developmental and neurologically based learning disorders. Visit Val's website at www.psykidz.co.uk.

Further information about this Talk

Further Reading:

Visit Val's website at www.psykidz.co.uk.

To get hold of Valerie Muter's and Helen Likierman's latest book on how parents can help with dyslexia, dyspraxia and related learning difficulties please click here.

Key Points Covered in This Talk:

• Background: Concentration is quite a big issue for many children with learning difficulties and sometimes can be part of the learning difficulty itself if they have an attention deficit or ADHD. A lot of children with dyslexia or dyspraxia may not have a core attention problem but because they find learning such a struggle, concentration becomes much more difficult to sustain. Children with learning problems need good concentration because they have to concentrate for longer and work harder than the children who don't have learning problems.
• Build up concentration span: This needs to be built up in very small, graded steps using a kitchen timer. Start by finding out the baseline length of time that your child can comfortably concentrate for (this could be as little as 5 minutes). Then find some activities that involve sitting down at a table and concentrating for five minutes. Once they are comfortable doing that you can step by step, minute by minute lengthen their concentration span. Draw their attention to the kitchen time so that they become increasingly time aware.
• Encourage looking and listening to instructions before action: Getting them into a looking and listening mindset makes a child ready to concentrate.
• Always reward good concentration efforts: It is important to give rewards for building up concentration span. Each time they sit down, concentrate and complete an activity in the given time period it is important to give a reward. Praise should be given all the time. Beyond this for younger chilren some form of sticker chart system could be helpful, for older children something more sophisticated is required (e.g. a points system that might be linked to pocket money).