I’m a classroom teacher and there is this one pupil who is 7 years old. He’s an ADHD kid. He’s always looking for a trouble. Every time I started my lesson he even doing movements, It can distract the other kids and I can say also that he is difficult in keeping focus during activity or homework. I thought this is just normal for someone like him because he is a kid.
Can you give me some tips or suggestions on how can I improve the behavior of an ADHD child in the classroom as his teacher?
Does your school have a form IEP process with a school psychologist? If you’re at a smaller private school, does the local school district have those resources?
Depending on the needs, the student may need more of a 504 plan where there are special accommodations made to his environment. Info re: IEP & 504
I’m assuming you’re in the US and by the sounds of it do not have special education resources at your disposal.
I’m not a special education teacher, but I have family members who are and have been through things with my own children. Most of the time I’d summarize what helps as more or less common sense and empathetic proactive measures. Does he like a certain book or task? Does he not like to be in a specific area or around specific peers? Use positive enforcement to get a reasonable amount of compliance according to his ability.
About your concern, I can suggest a website who has a blog about tips and suggestions about ADHD Child. You really need it in order for you to handle that kind of child’s attitude.
My son was diagnosed with adhd when he was 8 years old. Now that he is 15, he’s now really causing trouble in school. I’ve been called a couple of times to their school office and whenever I asked him about what happen, he always tells me that its just about his disorder. ADHD as I’ve known from his doctor, this isn’t part of the symptoms one might have.
Glad to be back here with some replies on my query. I wasn’t able to see these earlier but good thing he was taken by his mother to an ADHD clinic here in UK. I was also summoned by his doctor once so I would know what to do with him at school. Ever since, I really don’t want him to be separated from other kids so he won’t feel bad or sensitive about his situation, but I am advised to give him tasks that he’s enjoying. So far I manage to have a little playhouse inside my room and found him enjoying legos very much…
As someone who was not diagnosed, I feel inclined to think you and your son are relatively fortuned, but only with an opportunity, not a solution.
My personal journey started with this very intuitive assumption that “diagnosis” means “treatment” and that any and all things I exhibited are “symptoms” soon to be “treated”.
Diagnosis is merely an opportunity to see the person without the usual preconceived biases of norms, it does not change perception biases of their personality. It means that you might be better equipped to help ease pain and suffering that was going unnoticed and often mistakenly forced onto them in the form of blame of their failure to attain outcomes of preconceived biases of norms for many many years.
It will take you son time to adjust (as he goes through life), and he too will feel it fair to use against the world what the world, even if out of not knowing, has used against him so many times (being aligned to norms harder for him to adhere to). It goes unnoticed, but all those stories that had the wrong ending for him are going to be replayed and questioned in his mind.
He has and will always still be himself, with his own rare and unique story, momentarily a teen, and always with far more things to worry about than being ADHD… ADHD symptoms are merely observations of immediate differences in behaviours, not of identity, and certainly absent and void of non-clinical “human” things that even today are omitted from so called expert opinions — of those who try to treat what they do not necessarily know (experience).
I personally listen to doctors, and listen to myself (the patient), consider both views of their own merit, equally open to being right, and wrong… I had to know for myself, what is best for myself, and that was hardly how my mind was equipped to reasoned about problems when I was 15, but I was on to something nonetheless when no one else was until many years later when I was grown up enough to be taken with sufficient merit.
I know this might not directly address your immediate concerns, but I hope it gives you more to work with through your own unique journey as his parent.