Listening with your whole body is a concept used in schools to teach what “active listening” looks like for students by demonstrating an attentive listening posture. It assumes that a child’s body is working well for them but they just need more support to follow the listening rules and routines of the classroom. But we…
Whole Body Listening in the Classroom
As a child in a busy classroom how many times do you hear: “Pay attention,” “Quiet down and listen up,” “I’m not going to tell you again; You should have been listening to the instructions,” “Didn’t you hear me?” Teachers use many different strategies to gain the attention of their students and get them to…
Preparing for Peaceful Mealtimes
Tips for Peaceful Family Mealtimes Tip One: Never force your child to eat or clean their plate, bargain, punish, threaten, reward, coax, negotiate, or strongly encourage your child to eat. By doing this, you are setting yourself up for a show down with your child and making extra work for yourself. Tip Two: Ignore refusals,…
Essential Foundations of Fine Motor Skills
As a parent, when you bump into a fellow parent at the community center or local Starbucks, you may find yourself sharing about your child’s firsts…the first time he/she sat up or walked, spoke his/her first words…but not often when your child first held a block or grabbed a Cheerio with a fine pincer grasp….
Essential Foundations of Fine Motor Skills: Activities for Home
Vision Play Ball! Start by throwing a large ball to and from your child, and progress to smaller balls as able. When playing board games, present cards high, low, left, and right to encourage looking and reaching. Using Easels and LARGE paper/posters, create a connect the dot picture or place a vertical column of stickers/images…
Is it really ADHD?
Does my child have ADHD? During a parent teacher conference a teacher shared with a parent that her child has some of the behaviors associated with the diagnosis- looking around the room, having a hard time concentrating on work, being off task ( eg. getting a drink, going to the bathroom, staring out the window),…
Sensory Processing & Behavior: Is there something else going on?
Have you ever been told that your child is frequently “off-task” at school or appears to be “not listening”? When you talk to your child about this, he/she responds by saying “I hate school” “I don’t want to go” or “It was Joey’s fault.” Reward and motivation charts don’t seem to work and the teacher…