Hi all. This is my first post here. My son has ADHD and a language arts ld as well as emotional issues. It also takes him a longer time than others to write.
He currently has his first long-term project; they have about 2 weeks to complete it. It is for social studies, a class he takes in his regular education room. He needs to do a timeline of his life. His teacher has said she will accomodate him by giving him extra time/extended deadline. Any suggestions on how to teach a child the skills involved in organizing and completing a long-term project? Tonight as a first step, we made a list of the supplies he will need for his project and tomorrow we will gather those supplies. He had trouble focusing on just supplies and starting mentioning his ideas for his project so I made a word document on computer and printed it out with all his ideas. (This way if he loses it, I just print another.) We have also created a folder especially just for this project.
But as far as how to break the actual project itself into pieces that are doable in short-time periods and will move us toward completion, that I’m not sure about. Any ideas? Also, son tends to want to completely finish something once he starts. Any suggestions on how to deal with that? Because this certainly is not something he will be finishing in one sitting.
Also although this project is not for special ed class, I am thinking she should support him through this process. Any thoughts about what an appropriate role for her would be and how involved she should be?
Thanks much in advance.
projects
I may not be much help for in my 20+ years of teaching, I find many students, ADHD or not, have trouble breaking projects down into little pieces and have difficulty completing projects over time. I myself find that an unnatural way to work and I prefer to finish something once I start it. While that’s not always possible, I don’t work well a little bit at a time and neither do many other people.
When my own two sons had projects of this kind, we’d save them for the weekend and finish them in one fell swoop. My sons had too much homework during the week to be able to add on projects to it in any case.
My school advises 15 minutes a day for a project but children really don’t accomplish all that much in 15 minutes and 15 minutes a day for 2 weeks rarely gets the project done. You spend much of that 15 minutes kind of recollecting where you left off and warming up to get started up.
I hope your experience proves different.
Good luck.
Re: Handling Long-Term Projects
What I have done with my son is get him involved in figuring out what needs to be done and how to break it down. I then try to think ahead what would make it easier organization wise. He is really lousy at organization. We don’t do projects in one big swoop—his attention span isn’t that long. But I agree 15 minutes usually isn’t long enough unless you have clear cut tasks to do. Our first big one was in fourth grade when he had to write five sentences on 26 items along with have a picture. It was a dictionary on Florida. I got big manilla envelopes and put everything to do with each letter in an envelope. It seemed like overkill when he had just a couple done but it the end it was a life saver. He decided he would do one every night and five over the weekend. We spent one marathon weekend putting it all together. He had to have drawn a certain number of pictures but the rest were from the internet (which I got).
I guess I would say that you have to expect to work aside a kid for some time. I think this is true whether or not your child is LD. Of course, the length of time you have to do this and the level of assistance is greater with an LD child. A neighbor’s child is doing the same “island” project as my son. I was over there when she came and told her mother she had finished her rough draft of her brochure. Well, in my house my husband had sat with our son while he made notes about how he could answer the questions. I then typed an example on the computer since he didn’t really understand what a “brochure” meant. He then wrote his rough draft on the computer (he doesn’t type well but we’re trying to move him this way because in the end it is easier to edit). Not all his “sentences” are sentences so tonight I will first have him edit the typed copy. I will then sit with him and ask him questions to get him to edit it more. And so on.
I do look to see how I can make things easier. Until this year, I have usually typed my son’s work. He doesn’t do “final copies” very well. Now he is 11 and I am trying to make him do the typing himself…which takes longer but the goal is independence at some point.
My son was in a resource room when he did his Florida project. We didn’t get any assistance and I really didn’t expect to. They don’t work on regular classwork.
Beth
Check out Schwablearning.org They have an article on their home page this week on this very topic.