Make increasing attention a gradual process. Take a baseline by clocking how long your child can stick with a chore, homework, or other assigned task before needing a break. Once you establish the “base rate,” set a kitchen timer for 2–3 minutes longer than the base rate and challenge your child to keep working until the timer rings.
Keep a reduced but still present level of monitoring in place for the whole year. It may be hard to stick with it when things seem to be going so well, but it’s only with this duration of reinforcement that many kids maintain long-term improvements in sustained attention.
Don’t make any significant changes in the plan until your child has maintained improvements over one and preferably two marking terms (3 to 4 months). It’s not unusual for this plan to work initially, making parents and teachers overconfident that the problem has been solved permanently. But if you drop the plan altogether or become a lot less vigilant, your child’s performance is likely to return, even if only gradually, to preplan levels.
Make sure your child has the same assigned location in the classroom every day so the teacher knows that if she is not there, she’s probably off-task. We’ve used this system in public school classrooms for a number of years and found that success depends in good part on the teacher (or paraprofessional if there is one in class) maintaining the cueing and check-in system. The only way for this to be practical is for the student to be in a consistent location in the room.
Ellen never seems to get her second-grade work done. The problem began last year in first grade once students were expected to complete seatwork independently. Her teacher made some accommodations, such as reducing the workload, because Ellen was clearly a bright student who seemed to be able to master the lessons even though she couldn’t always get her work done. This year’s teacher is not so inclined, though, and work completion is becoming a bigger issue. Mrs. Barker, her teacher, first raised the issue at the parent–teacher conference that accompanied the end of the first marking period. “Ellen is such a social child,” she said. “She seems to be able to keep track of everything else going on in the class and wants to help other students when they get stuck, but somehow can’t find her way to getting through her own work.” Shortly afterward, Mrs. Barker started sending home with Ellen the work that she hadn’t finished in school with the instructions to get it done for homework. Her mother finds herself spending long homework sessions with Ellen trying to get her through the work.
Giving children developmentally appropriate chores to do is one of the best ways to begin teaching task initiation. Starting in preschool or kindergarten, this helps teach children that there are times when they have to set aside what they want to do in favor of something that needs to get done even though it may not be fun.
Don’t hesitate to reinstitute use of the cues and the timer for a few weeks if your child stops initiating assigned chores or other tasks over a period of a month or more. Sometimes kids need a refresher course.
Involve your child as much as possible in the planning process once you’ve been providing models for a while. Ask, “What do you need to do first? And then what?” and so on and write down each step as the child dictates it to you.
