The next step is to challenge the child to understand the relationships of objects in space. To develop big-picture thinking, a child needs to classify what she sees, to recognize larger patterns that are now symbolized.
Strengthening Activities.
Among the concepts a child needs to understand, an important one is that of conservation. For instance, three blocks stacked end to end have the same volume as three blocks stacked like a tower. The best way for the child to learn these concepts is by actually playing with the objects and experimenting with the physical world, so she can experience how physical space and weight and quantity and shape can all be transformed. As suggested earlier, you might ask the child to experiment with clay. What To Take For ADD
Take two squares of clay that are exactly the same, roll one piece into a ball, divide the other piece to make two smaller balls, and then ask, "Which has more clay in it, the big ball or the two little balls?" and see if she can figure out that they're the same amount. You can also use a food that the child likes to eat - such as cookie dough - and make it into different shapes. The child will be invested in getting the one that's bigger. You can also do this with juice - pour the same amount into a long, thin glass and into a short, fat glass and ask her which glass has more juice.
Through these kinds of games, the child begins to realize that looks can be deceiving, and that she has to take a multidimensional approach to figuring out whether one quantity of something is more or less than another quantity. This understanding takes place over a long period of time; for older verbal children who haven't yet mastered these visual-spatial concepts, ask them, "So, what do you make of the fact that you started off with the two things that were the same, and now you're telling me there's more of one than the other? Are you a magician? How did you do that?" Then the child can go back and experiment again - pour the liquid back into the tall, thin container or the short, fat container, or put the blocks that are lined up like a train into the shape of a tower.
As children get the sense of quantity and the various dimensions of space, they are developing some of the formal systems, such as what we call "one-to-one correspondence," that is, that "three" equals those three blocks that are piling up. They also begin to understand that the shapes they're looking at, the lines and circles and half-circles, make letters - a's, b's, and c's - and that these letters correspond to sounds, and then that these sounds can be blended together to make words. In this way, play and experiments with a variety of objects make a foundation for more formal academic activities that may challenge a child with ADHD.
Activities to Strengthen Comparative Thinking.
To further strengthen a child's understanding of what he sees and hears, we can introduce more complex games. For example, Harry Wachs has developed a number of games in which he has children copy various designs from different perspectives (not as the designs look straight on to the child, but how they look in mirror image, or how they look upside-down - that is, from the perspective of the person sitting across the table). So the child has to understand the directions and transform what he sees, picturing the design from another perspective, rather than just copying it. Or you might have a child look at a picture of the front of a house, and then draw what the back of the house might look like, and so forth. Then you can challenge the child to create his own design that he has to replicate from different perspectives, These kinds of games develop comparative thinking in the spatial arena, just as it's developing in the verbal arena. What To Take For ADD
Games with clay can also strengthen what we call gray-area thinking. You can start simply, by lining up balls of clay from smaller to larger, but then shape one piece of clay into a rope form, one into a ball form, one into a square form, and so forth, and then despite the shapes the child has to remember which shape has the smaller mass, which has the slightly bigger mass, and which has the biggest mass. She is playing with sequences of visual images and putting them in various relationships to each other, in what Piaget called "seriation tasks." This helps the child to understand (later on) the idea of graphs and helps with mathematical reasoning.
To keep a child with attention problems engaged in these activities, before we start calling the process "multiplication" or "division" or even "addition" or "subtraction," it is important to use real objects the child values - food, trucks, fancy blocks, coins, and the like.
Let him experience and understand addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with these items, and then you can give the process the proper label and make it more systematic, and you can also show the child how to represent it with numbers. As we pointed out, first the process has to have emotional meaning. If the child is negotiating for a brownie or a truck from among several of different sizes, he's going to be very invested in picking the larger brownie or the bigger truck. To learn more, you can check out What To Take For ADD.
