By Martha Halter

Do you have children in your classroom with attention issues? This is a problem that virtually all teachers face. We have all had students that simply cannot seem to pay attention for a sustained amount of time. Are they all ADHD/ADD? Surely that cannot be true. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 3-5% of children have ADHD or ADD.In a classroom of 25 children, that means that about 1 or 2 truly suffer from the disorder. However, most teachers have more children that have attention issues in a typical classroom. What is an educator to do?

First of all, let’s think about what we are asking these children to do. How many of us would trade places with them and sit at one of those desks for seven hours a day? Do teachers sit in a student chair? Of course not! Ours are padded, or we go out and buy ourselves a comfortable chair, right? But we ask children to sit in a hard chair, at a desk, for 30 minutes or more while we present the lesson, and then another 30 minutes while they complete their work, and we wonder why they fidget! Wouldn’t you? I would!

Think about when you go to a workshop. It might be a presentation that you have wanted to attend for a long time. You are motivated and eager to learn. After the first hour or so, you get up and take a restroom break, or get a drink of water, or go and stand in the back of the room. Adults recognize that this is acceptable behavior. It’s hard to sit still for several hours, isn’t it? And yet we expect children to do it!

So what can we do to help our students pay attention to our lessons? Let’s break it down into several different areas and address each one with easy to implement, practical strategies to help kids pay attention in the classroom.

First of all, let’s start off by reiterating that the attention span of most kids is 15 minutes. Did you get that? This is not the attention span of ADHD or ADD kids. This is the attention span for the typical child, and probably of many adults, if we’re really honest!

So the easiest thing to do is to break our lessons into 15 minute chunks. But, you say, I simply cannot teach a lesson in just 15 minutes! No, of course you can’t. But you can break the lesson up into chunks. For example, if you are teaching a lesson about telling time, present the information about the long hand and the short hand. Go over examples together and practice telling time by randomly calling on students for answers. Then, when you can tell that the students are beginning to wander, have them stand up and SHOW you the time using their arms. Why? Well, it allows the student to stand up and stretch a little, get out of that hard chair for a minute or two. They are practicing the skill. It doesn’t all have to be paper and pencil! In fact, they are more likely to remember a concept if they put movement with it. When I was in 9^th grade Geometry, I had trouble remembering which direction was vertical and which was horizontal. I asked my teacher, Mr. Samide, and he replied, “Stand up.” I stood up, and he said, “Miss Searle, you are vertical. Have a seat.” I have never confused the two again! Mr. Samide knew that I would forever associate that movement with horizontal, and he was right! A man ahead of his time!

Physical environment

• Consider letting students bring in a pad to put in their chair and make it more comfortable.
  
• Make sure that students are comfortable with the temperature. Encourage them to put on a jacket if they are cold. If most of the students are warm, and you are cold, turn the air down and bring a jacket to school!
• Consider indirect lighting instead of the overhead fluorescent lights. Buy an inexpensive floor lamp. The general consensus about lighting is that NO ONE does well with fluorescent lights, but they are in virtually all of our classrooms.
• Some children are more comfortable sitting on the floor. Does it really matter where they sit, as long as they are getting their work done and not disturbing anyone else? I always gave my students the option to work on the floor instead of their desks. The first day, every single child chose a spot on the floor. Very quickly, however, students would begin to ask, “Can I move back to my desk?” The answer of course, was yes! One by one, most of the students moved back to their desks. Who stayed on the floor? Those kids that really did better work there!
• Move the children that struggle with paying attention. Put them at the FRONT of the room, not the back!

Giving Directions

• Be clear and concise.

• Have students repeat the directions back to you, randomly asking them about the assignment.
  

• Use the student's names as you give directions so that students have to pay close.
  

• Speak in a very soft voice attention in order to hear what you are saying.

• Use funny voices or just vary your tone as you are talking. It will catch the students’ attention. I was in a classroom, and one girl in particular kept talking. Finally, after repeatedly asking her to stop disrupting, I went over to her and did my best Yoda imitation. “Talk to your neighbor, you will not!” She laughed, but she got it! I had her attention.

Time on task

• Limit the amount of time that you are talking. Let the students talk and give input.

• Let the kids talk first That’s right! I said, let them talk first. I was teaching a lesson on healthy food choices, and every first grader wanted to tell me their favorite healthy foods. I gave them thirty seconds to turn to a neighbor and tell them their favorite healthy foods. We were all happy! The kids got to talk, and I didn’t get interrupted while I was going over the food pyramid!

• Intersperse physical responses throughout your lessons! Brain research shows that if you put movement with learning, we remember it much more easily!
  

• Give one assignment at a time.
  

• Monitor students’ work by walking around the classroom. You’ll catch mistakes and see who is off task much more easily than if you were sitting at your desk.

• Look at the assignment and decide what is really important. I worked with a child who was dreadfully behind in his work. The assignment given was to color every answer choice on the paper and then circle the correct answer. What was really important – the coloring or the learning? I told him not to worry about the coloring, just circle the correct choice and move on. He did what was important, and then was free to work on other unfinished work.

Emotional atmosphere

• Laugh. A lot. Something is funny. (It should go without saying that you never, never, never laugh at a child. That is never funny. Never allow other children to make a joke at another child’s expense. That creates a threatening, unsafe atmosphere.)
• Know your students. What do they like to do outside of school? Are they dancers, soccer players, skateboarders, guitar players? If they know you are interested in them as people, they are more likely to work for you. Don’t you work better for someone that genuinely cares about you? Of course you do!
• Use your students’ names. A lot. Our name is who we are. It is special to us. Those teachers who have 120 kids a day and still know all of their names are my heroes! The principal at my children’s school knows virtually all of the children in our school – over 400 of them! What does that do for a child? It shows that they are special. They matter.
• Kindly remind kids to work. Use a soft, kind voice to remind them to get to work. You might be frustrated, but don’t show it. That just turns a student off.
• Use a gentle touch. As you walk around the room, lightly touch a child’s shoulder. This simple touch will remind their brain to refocus.

Curriculum

• Incorporate music in as many ways as you can! Teach the kids songs to help them remember information, or let them make up their own!
• Incorporate movement as much as possible. It doesn’t take a whole cheerleading routine to get their attention! If you have three things that you want the kids to remember, tell them the first one and have them take a step. Tell them the second one and take another step, and so on. Keep it simple, but let them move!
• Incorporate colors! Let them use colored pens to do their work. Does it all really have to be in black or blue?
• Use manipulatives as much as possible. This is NOT just for the kinesthetic kids. Everyone learns better with hands-on activities
•  Use games to teach concepts. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate, manufactured game. Be creative and have fun! I was teaching kids about adjectives, and they begged for a game. I split them up into groups, and told them to come up with as many different plausible adjectives as they could to describe a dog. After a set period of time, we regrouped and each group read out their list. If another group had the same adjective, both groups crossed it out. One group had 27 adjectives that no one else came up with! Wow!! Much better than a worksheet!
• Give them permission to move!! Find ways for them to move that are acceptable. Let them wiggle their fingers under their desks, where it won’t disturb others. Give them koosh balls to squeeze… again, under their desks. Okay, now go and pick one or two from each category and try it in your classroom! Be sure to email us and let us know how it worked, or other ideas that worked in your classroom! 

Great websites for more ideas

http://www.totallearningcenter.com/PDFs/Exercise.pdf

http://www.ldonline.org/article/8022

http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/learning/teacher.shtml

http://addadhd.suite101.com/article.cfm/teaching_the_adhd_child__part_1

http://www.adhd-made-simple.com/ADHD_Children.html

http://www.additudemag.com/adhd/article/3290.html

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