If children are to pay attention and remain calm and regulated, they need to invest what they see with emotional meaning. It's not just about noticing the red ball; it's about playing a game with Mommy that includes the red ball. Then the child associates seeing the red ball with the pleasure of playing with Mommy and will pay more attention to it. We want to combine the physical, inanimate world with the human world, using vision as a bridge between the two. A child building a model railroad with his father will care about each length of track, each coupling and station.
Strengthening Activities.
There are many games in which caregivers - parents or a sibling or a therapist - elicit the child's interest and attention. With a young child, maybe you start off by simply putting a little teddy bear in your pocket, with its head sticking out, so the child, in trying to get the bear, is relating to you and the object at the same time. Then you can gradually make it more complicated: Hide the bear somewhere, or give it a horsey ride so that the child has to come after you to get a horsey ride with the bear. This creates a visual link between you and the object in which the child is already interested, and helps the child learn to track because he's following your movements - left to right, up and down, behind the chair and so forth. How Do I Know I Have ADD
Visual-Spatial Problem Solving
At this point, we want to help the child become aware of his body and other objects in space. We want to help him develop his motor planning and sequencing skills because the motor system is needed for visual problem solving. If the child has severe motor problems, such as in cerebral palsy; motor tasks can be simple, such as just turning and looking or using tongue movements, but there will still be some movement by which the child can indicate his visual awareness of the environment.
When the child becomes aware of his body in space and his body in relationship to other people and objects, he becomes aware not just of the visual world but of the interaction between himself and others. In playing with others, he must anticipate and judge the distance he has to cover to get to others across the room. He's also getting the sense of time - how long it takes to get there - without even knowing the concept of seconds and minutes. Along with visual skills, the concepts of space and time are now forming experientially for the child.
Strengthening Activities.
If a child has some motor planning challenges, but not severe motor problems, you can go through the motor exercises described earlier (such as the Evolution Game). Keep attaching some visual goal to the exercise. For example, the child might be squiggling or crawling on the floor to catch up with his sister who is playing a racehorse.
We want to keep expanding the range of objects, colors, shapes, and so forth that we use - in interaction with our own bodies - to interest the child. Caregivers can play hiding games with an object - holding a piece of candy in one hand, then hiding it somewhere on themselves so the child has to find it. Is it in Daddy's hand? In his pocket? Is he sitting on it so the child has to push Daddy off the couch and run after him to get it? This way the child learns to use vision in a highly flexible way, and begins to develop real visual-spatial problem-solving abilities. Balance and coordination exercises are also important to develop because they allow the child to get a sense of his own body in space and to move fluidly in relationship to other moving objects.
In these games, you want to help the child integrate the left and right sides of his body; you can do this by encouraging actions that require using the left hand and right hand together and using the left and right feet together - climbing, running, jumping, and complicated crawling. One of the best ways to work on visual tracking, which is necessary for reading and playing computer games, is to play throwing and catching games. You can entice the child into first just rolling the ball back and forth and then to his left and to his right. For a preverbal child, you can then hold the ball and say, "It's high" or "It's low" and, as the child is reaching for it, say, "It's next to this" or "It's behind that." Long before the child understands the words, he's getting the experience of the different dimensions of space that will later become more meaningful to him when he develops verbal language.
There's no end to the kinds of activities or games one can come up with in order to facilitate visual-spatial problem solving. The important thing is to have fun, while keeping the child invested in you and in all the details in the environment.
Stages of Auditory Processing
A child first learns to decode sounds, like distinguishing a t from a p. For example, when she hears "Be tracient" instead of "Be patient," she may get confused. A baby must learn to distinguish different sounds. Fortunately, as children's nervous systems grow they tend to be able to decode the different sounds in what they hear by hearing them in context and associating them in experience. Japanese children learn to distinguish different sounds than American children. How Do I Know I Have ADD
Later, a child learns to sequence these sounds and thus to understand whole words, Next come combinations of whole words, and a child can follow simple directions, like "Please open the door." The child then begins to form different answers to w questions (where, who, when, and what). Eventually, a child is able to answer a "why" question (between ages three and four years), which means he is beginning to comprehend more abstract questions, like "Why do you want to go to the store?" or "How do you feel about your friend Johnny who is sick today?" or "How do you feel about Grandma being in the hospital?"
However, even if children can understand this, they may not be able to deal with a sequence of concepts or directions. Inability to put what they are hearing in a linear, sequential pattern is a common problem we see in children with ADHD. Imagine that a teacher says, "I want you to do the first three problems on your math homework, then show them to me, and then if you've got them right, go ahead and do the next three, and so on." Some kids have no problem in following that sequence. For other children, it becomes a blurry quagmire of words strung together, and they get lost somewhere along this highway of directions, in a ditch, so to speak. This makes them appear inattentive and often to be inattentive, because they may tune out when they get overloaded.
When children get confused you can encourage them to raise a hand and say, "Run that by me again" or "Slow down and give it to me one step at a time." With mild sequencing problems, in learning a series of steps in a new dance, say, the instructor can break it down into individual steps and repeat each step until the child catches on.
In a third stage, a child can process what she hears into abstract concepts. If a teacher is talking about how a character in a book was feeling, this is an abstract concept, and if the child doesn't comprehend this, she may tune out and watch something out the window. More abstract concepts come up in math, such as fractions and long division. When a teacher gives an explanation, some kids can get it easily, but others have difficulty. A teacher who recognizes this can help the child by offering diagrams, charts, or other graphic aids rather than verbal explanations. To learn more, you can check out How Do I Know I Have ADD.
