Homeschooling ADD Kids

For the past two weeks the unit studies that appear on this blog each Monday have been about dinosaurs.  Weekly Unit Study: Dinosaurs Part 1 taught reading, writing, computer skills, graph usage, science, and art.  Weekly Unit Study: Dinosaurs Part 2 focused on teaching more reading, writing, science, and art as well as math.

Today we’re going to work on your child’s Internet research skills.  As we’ve mentioned before, memorization of facts is important for certain things such as multiplication tables, spelling and general knowledge of topics.  And we have physical exercises and games on this blog to help children with ADD to improve their memory.  However, even more important than memorization is that of teaching your child how to research.

Researching information can also help you child to develop his own ideas about things after having read over information in which there are sometimes differing opinions.  As Emerson wrote "Do not go where the path leads; rather, go where there is no path and leave a trail."

Nowadays most research is done online.  That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on whether your child knows how to use the Internet to do research.  It’s also important to keep in mind that if your child has Attention Deficit Disorder, it’s very easy for him to wander about from link to link instead of keeping focused on the subject that he is searching.

CAUTION: Don’t allow your child to use the Internet without your supervision.  As you well know, the Internet is full of great info, but it also has a lot of nasty sites.  Keeping the computer in a public area is highly advisable.

Searching for dinosaur info online

Rather than just looking for any information at all about dinosaurs, let’s make the research more specific by having your child look for information that answers the following questions:

1. What did dinosaurs eat?
2. What were some of the strangest dinosaurs?
3. What other animals were alive at the same time as dinosaurs?
4. What are the different ideas as to how dinosaurs disappeared? (We saw one theory in Weekly Unit Study: Dinosaurs Part 2, but there are others.)
5. What was the Earth like when dinosaurs lived?

The search engine that we are going to use is Ask.com, since it’s a search engine designed to work with full questions like the ones we have above. 

Once you’ve gone to the Ask.com site, show your child how to type the first question into the search engine box, and click the Search button or the Enter key on the keyboard.

Retrieval results can change from hour to hour, so I don’t know exactly what you will see, but generally the first results will be from paid sponsors.  Here’s what I got when I did the search on this question:

You’ll quickly notice that many of the sponsored links are not very relevant to your search.  It’s important that your child understand that usually the more relevant results (just tell him the "better" ones) appear below the sponsored links.  For example, when I scrolled down past the sponsored links, here’s what I got:

You can tell right away that the answers to the five questions we posed can be found at these links.  Like I said before, it might be that you have different websites retrieved than when I did the search.  However, the results you get should be quite relevant to your search. 

Ask your child to read the paragraph summaries below the first three or four links and then ask him which site he would like to visit to find more information about what dinosaurs ate.  Explain to him that even though he might find the answer right within the paragraph below the link, there is usually more information on the site itself, so it would be helpful to click on the link.

Once he has clicked on the link, show him how to find the answer to the question on the web page.  Sometimes the answer is right there with no other info.  Other times it’s buried within paragraphs of other information not directly related to the question which you are trying to answer. 

Teach your student how to scan through the paragraphs, looking for the information related to what dinosaurs eat, but without reading each word of each paragraph.  Scanning through info does not come easily to many kids, so one way to teach them how to do this is to tell them to move his eyes along the lines of text, but without reading the words.  Instead, just look for the words "eat", "eats", "ate" of "food".  Once he finds the word, ask him to read the sentence in which it appears as well as a few sentences after it until the discussion changes from talking about what dinosaurs eat to something else.

Now take out a notebook and dedicate a page or two to dinosaur research (just use a blank sheet of paper if you don’t have a notebook handy).  Have your child write the question "What do dinosaurs eat? at the top of the page.  Ask him to write the first answer below the question.  Tell him he cannot look at the website while doing it.  This is an excellent way to teach your child how to put info that they have researched into their own words. 

Since you’re not working on memory skills right now, if you’re child can’t recall what he read, tell him to read it again, but then turn the monitor away from him as he writes his answer.  If he has a very good memory, it might be that the sentences he writes don’t sound like his own and mirrors the site’s phrases too much.  If that’s the case, ask him what the sentence means, or to tell it to you "using different words".  His response should sound more like himself.  Then have him write down what he said.

Repeat these basic steps using each of the five questions we started with.  However, this time instead of having him scan the lines of text on the web page visually, teach him how to use Ctrl-F on the keyboard to find words on the page related to the question he is trying to answer.  This is, of course, a faster, more-logical way to research online, but having him scan the text visually will help him understand the principle behind what the browser’s Find tool does.

If this researching the answers to the questions takes too long or he becomes impatient, take an exercise break, a walk, or just do less questions. 

Writing a summary of the research

Teaching your child how to write a simple research paper, even if he is still very young and has strong ADD symptoms, will prove to be a valuable aid to him in many aspects of his life as he grows older, such as while pursuing further education or preparing presentations for secular work.

Have him read through his answers at least twice.  Now take his answers away from him, have him start with a clean sheet of paper and ask him to write an introductory paragraph that will explaining the topics that will be covered in this research paper. 

Next, have him write one paragraph answering each of the questions, but ask him which question he thinks should be answered first.  Tell him that he can add other paragraphs about other things he learned about dinosaurs when doing the unit studies during the two previous weeks. 

If he cannot remember some of the answers to the questions he researched, give him some hints without reading his sentences to him.  The purpose of this "rewrite" is so that he rearranges the sentences and paragraphs, continuing to reword his thoughts.  This is great exercise for the brain and encourages creativity.

When he is finished writing the paragraphs containing answers to the questions he researched and other facts that he learned while doing the dinosaur unit lesson, show him how to write a concluding paragraph that summaries what has been learned.

This can be a rather long, mentally exhausting process, especially for a child with Attention Deficit Disorder.  Don’t push him too hard if he is having a too tough of a time getting through it.  Instead, have him write only one paragraph and then switch to a different homeschooling task or give him a break.  Then after 15 to 20 minutes have him write another paragraph, etc.  Some kids with ADD can only handle certain tasks such as writing a page full of researched information if they constantly switch between tasks.  This is okay, as long as he eventually finishes the research project.

What do you think?

Let me know how you liked this week’s lesson.  Share some ideas on how you might have done it differently or ways we can improve future lessons!

Next week

Next Monday we’ll be using the unit study on dinosaurs to do some physical exercises and games to help improve your child’s memory in math and spelling.  See you then!

3 Comments | In: dinosaurs, reading, research skills, unit studies, writing | | #

Memorizing facts usually bores kids with Attention Deficit Disorder.  Actually, it even bores kids who have no attention challenges, but can be shear drudgery for ADD children.

So am I suggesting that you should do away with teaching your kids to memorize when you homeschool them?  Definitely not.  A certain amount of memorization is necessary, such as multiplication tables, key dates in history, vocabulary when learning a foreign language, etc.  In fact, if you’re interested in learning one of the best ways to help your kids memorize facts, see my previous post on using exercise and body movements to homeschool.  (The link will open in a new window, so just close it if you wish to return back to this post.)

However, there are only so many hours in a week and an endless amount of information that could be memorized.  So let me suggest a skill that is even more important that memorization: learning how to do research.

Think about it.  If your kids goes to college later on, how will they write their term papers?  If they need information for a business presentation (or for anything else for that matter) how will they find what they need?

You might at first think that they can just find the information they need on the Internet.  And they probably will.  But good research is not just a matter of typing a phrase in Google and clicking on links.  A lot of info out there on the web is repetitive.  Many sites are not real sources of information on topics, but rather commercial/sales sites.  But more importantly, it’s extremely fragmented.  There’s a bit of good info on one site, then a little more on another site, and a third one offers information that contradicts the first one.  Wikipedia is great, but it’s only a beginning point when researching a topic in depth.  And for some topics, it’s best to go to a library.

Children need to be taught, not only about the various sources of information and how to use them, but they also need to learn how to do the following:

• filter out the info that they don’t need and gather that which they do
• investigate contradictions and learn how to either find which is correct or how to present both sides of an issue
• take meaningful notes
• put the information in their own words (so that they are not just copying and pasting someone else’s words)

Since kids with ADD love to search and investigate, leverage that interest and teach them how to research.  They’re not going to be able to memorize everything they need to know in life and for their future careers, but learning how to be a good researcher will give them access to an endless supply of useful knowledge.

No Comments | In: memory, research skills | | #