Home schooling - how to improve attention in children
It is very important, once decided for homeschooling, to keep the focus and the attentions of our loved ones.
Studying at home is quite good, and it gives a unique experience to your child, I posted about the advantages, and disadvantages of this approach in here on @steemskillshare, and if you are interested you can find out my previous publications in my personal page.
One big challenge is to keep them focused on the studying topic day after day.
It is true that, even at school, the situation is not really different, and the attention issue is a problem at all levels of education, home school or not.
With this post, I would like to summarize some information I'm gathering to help myself as a parent in my home school experience with my son.
What is attention
I think that it is very important to start on what attention really is, once you get acknowledged with the main concept I think it will be easier to understand what is the best way for your own children.
In general, attention can be defined as that cognitive function that allows us to give importance to some stimuli and eliminate others. There is no single type of attention, but different ramifications of the same, which can be summarized as follows:
- Focused : allows you to select only the relevant stimuli, discarding the distracting ones.
- Sustained : it is the ability to maintain concentration useful for completing a certain task.
- Divided : implies the ability to keep attention on multiple tasks at the same time.
- Alternate : allows you to perform multiple tests by shifting the attention from one to the other to be able to carry them out in parallel.
Family tricks to improve attention in children
If we want to improve attention in our children, first let us ask ourselves what example we give them and in what emotional climate we live in the family!
Very often we spend time, myself included, running from one part of the house, and the city to the other, at times we scream, we stress our children about delays, about the times to follow, and we provide them with millions of stimuli to reflect on, then at night, in the silence we ask ourselves: why my son is always distracted, he goes from one game to another and is stressed?
The answer, alas, is often found in us parents !!
Reduce the television and mobiles
I know it well as a parent that in many moments of the day we don't know where to turn because of the chores to be done, and sometimes we don't have anyone to play or keep an eye on our children.
During these moments, the temptation to use the screen as a babysitter is very strong, but let's be brave, activate our cognitive resources and our imagination and try to involve our children in activities either with us or alone that can stimulate them, without resorting to television or the like every time.
This is because numerous studies have seen how prolonged use of these electronic means reduces attention and memory capacities !
Sleep early
If we want to improve attention in children and generally help them maintain concentration for an extended period of time, it is important that our children rest well!
This means, in proportion to age, that children should go to bed early in the evening (between 8.30 and 9.30) and sleep constantly until the next morning.
You will find that the children will not only be more rested, but calmer and generally attentive to school and the various activities they carry out!
Tolerance for frustrations
I know well how much easier it is sometimes, indeed always, to say YES to everything our children ask of us, immediately satisfying them in their requests.
Sometimes we seem to hurt them by saying NO or to wait, our hearts tighten to see their tears on their faces! In fact, I assure you that if we want to create children who are more self-confident, more able to tolerate stress in the future and with greater attention skills, we must help them cope with frustrations, NO !!
At the beginning it will be very hard, but if we persist in this undertaking, our children will also get used to knowing how to wait, to keep attention on a certain topic while waiting to see its developments in the future!
Give simple tasks
To improve attention in children, it is very useful to give them tasks with non-complex multiple requests and to see if they are able to complete them.
For example, after breakfast in the morning you can say to your child: “When you finish breakfast, remember to brush your teeth and put on an apron”.
Often as parents, we make the mistake of filling our children with words to the point that we not only confuse them, but we get used to not listening to us !!
Conclusion
These are just some examples, that helped me during these days, and I previously gathered online, and discuss in my community of friends that opted to homeschool like me.
As I said, each child is different, and if you are facing the same problem, you need to understand what he or she really needs.
Thank you for this post, it is very informative, and I think it will help many people