Tools and strategies to help manage time, stay focused, and handle homework
Grade Level: Grades 5-8
What Teachers See: How ADHD Impacts Learning in Middle School
Middle-schoolers with ADHD may have a hard time organizing and completing more complicated work. They can also struggle with peer relationships. Here’s what your child’s teacher may be seeing.
When Focus Is Fleeting — and Painful
For many students with ADHD, maintaining sustained focus on schoolwork is a mentally draining challenge. There is no magic trick for increasing naturally low attention spans, but parents and teachers who use these strategies with struggling students report real, significant results.
Help Kids Get Their Middle School Mojo
The transition to middle school can be tough enough without having to also juggle ADHD. Learn how to teach your child to make to-do lists, be courteous in conversation and manage medication to help make her experience fun.
Every 504 Plan Should Include These ADHD Accommodations
Impulsive behavior. Incomplete homework. Inconsistent focus. Whatever your child’s school challenges, these teacher-approved accommodations can put some real muscle behind his 504 Plan and put the attention back on learning.
School-Wide Strategies for Managing: Hyperactivity
ADHD and Exercise
Studies show that even half an hour a day can help kids function better and feel better.
School-Wide Strategies for Managing: Off Task/Intervention
Avoiding Working Memory Overload in Students with LDs
Working memory is the ability to hold and manipulate information in mind over short periods of time. Complex thinking and learning draw on working memory. Working memory supports school learning across the curriculum, from following instructions, to learning to read, to solving mathematical and scientific problems. Given that much of classroom instruction depends on working memory skills, the academic environment may be particularly challenging for students with learning disabilities (LDs) who often have working memory deficits (Gathercole & Alloway, 2008; Dehn, 2008). Reduced working memory abilities might make it difficult for these students to process as much information or to process information as rapidly or automatically as their peers. Overall, students with working memory deficits will have to work much harder than their typically developing peers to learn and carry out classroom activities. Because we know that students with poor working memory will face substantial learning difficulties when task demands exceed available working memory resources, providing learning support in the classroom is important for overcoming poor working memory skills.
The Exercise Prescription
Classrooms Accommodations for ADHD
Students with ADHD have difficulty with attention and self-control. And at school, that can look like inattention, distractibility, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and disorganization—all of which can get in the way of learning. What classroom accommodations can help students with ADHD? Here are some strategies teachers can try.