I’m working as a day camp counselor this summer (i’m 19), and one of the children in my group has ADHD. He’s 5 years old, and according to his school district doesn’t qualify for a shadow. His mother, based on the conversations I’ve had with her so far, doesn’t really have much advice.
The problem, mainly, is that we have a large group—there are 14-16 children at any given time, all going into kindergarten. There are 3 counselors, and usually one of us is taking kids to the bathroom or the nurse’s office or something like that, so often there are only 2 counselors with the group. This means that none of us can give J, the child with ADHD, the kind of individual attention that he really needs.
As a result he wanders away from us constantly. Sometimes this presents problems for his physical safety—I’m forever catching him trying to shut himself into lockers when we’re changing for swim. Chasing after him and trying to explain things to him takes a great deal of attention away from the other campers, which is firstly unsafe and secondly unfair. I do know that the best things are to give him lots of personal attention, short tasks, and patient, repeated explanations… but in a large group setting this is very rarely possible.
He also has a bad habit of throwing temper tantrums and refusing to do things because he “can’t.” I think this is partly due to his age, but some of the things he “can’t” do are really things that he won’t—such as throwing a piece of trash away, or picking something up off the floor. My co-counselors and I end up having to yell at him frequently, just to get his attention—agian, because we’re with a large group. We also have to move him physically a lot of the time, and although he doesn’t wander if he’s holding one of our hands, we can’t keep him holding on without holding tightly.
I’m not comfortable with the yelling or the physical efforts, at least not to the degree that we’re forced to do it… I have another 6 weeks of working with this child in the group, and I’m hoping to find ways to help him and keep him under control, that are more effective and less unpleasant.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Jessie
Also, my e-mail address is [email protected], if anyone wants to reply that way.
My own children with attention issues always were much better for other people than for me so I can’t help there. But you might want to post on the ADHD board—it gets more traffic than this one.
Sounds to me like the camp really isn’t set up to handle a child like him.
Beth