Homeschooling ADD Kids

I thought I’d take a moment and write about how this past Monday’s unit study, "Dogs, Part 1" went for Steven and I.

I decided to have him read "Nobody’s Dog" at the Children’s Library, which is an online reading site.  Unfortunately, the link wasn’t working, which was odd since it worked when I first created the unit study.  Anyway, I fixed it and it works now.  I hate broken links, especially on this blog.  Please do let me know if any of you ever encounter any links on our blog that aren’t working and I’ll fix them right away.

Once I fixed the link and we found the online book, he had a great time reading it.  It was somewhat below Steven’s reading level, but I think that helped to reinforce his confidence in reading.  He read at a quick pace and seemed rather proud of himself.

After that I looked for an online book that I could read to him.  I wanted one that was beyond his reading ability, with words he might not understand, but interesting enough that he would want to understand them.  I picked Jack London’s Call of the Wild, available at Literature.org. 

Despite Steven’s ADD, he paid rapt attention during 25 minutes of reading.  That was amazing.  There were many words he wasn’t familiar with, but still he listened.  I didn’t want to stop over and over to define terms, but three or four times he stopped me and asked me "what does that mean?"  Now for those of you who homeschool a kid with ADD, you know that it’s a rare thing for an ADD child to listen so attentively that he asks what words mean. 

So why did it work so well?

Well, I did put a lot of emotion into the reading, changed my voice for the different characters, sped up during intense parts, etc., and maybe that helped a tad.  But I’ve done that before for when reading other books and didn’t see this kind of response from Steven. 

The more I thought about it, I realized that what really caused Steven to pay so much attention was probably the combination of these two things:

1. The Call of the Wild is a fantastic book, a classic.  As Robert M. Pirsig wrote, "you know what Quality is".  It seems kids recognize it, too.
2. Steven is nuts about dogs.  Like I wrote about in my post "Using Your ADD Child’s Obsession in Homeschooling," kids learn better when it’s related to something they love.

I just added the Call of the Wild link to the unit study since it worked so well for us.  We’ll continue reading it each week until we finish it.

The store trip went rather well, too.  I had him write out the shopping list for the items we needed for making the dog treats.  Then, when we got to the store, I told him I’d help him put the groceries in the cart but he had to find them.  At first he was put off by that.  He found some things right away, but had trouble with finding the cornmeal.  So I explained to him it kind of like flour.  He then realized it would be in the Baking aisle and located it.  I thought it was a good exercise in learning how things are categorized in a store.

Before going to the checkout, I explained to Steven that we have to pay taxes on any non-food items.  He had found a Hot Wheels truck that he wanted to buy with his own money, so (using a calculator, I’ll admit) we figured out how much tax would be charged and added it onto the price of the car.  He then went up to the cashier himself and figured out how many dollars to give him.  Afterward I had him count the change that was given to him, explaining that he could get cheated if he doesn’t count it.

He wasn’t crazy about the math side of things that I had him do at the store, but I talked to him about how when he is older, he won’t always have someone else to go to the store with him, and that he needs to learn how to figure out taxes, how much money to pay and what to expect back in order to buy things.  That seemed to make sense to him.  ADD kids, even more than other kids have to see the relationship between what they are learning and real life.  If they don’t, they just push the matter aside and ignore it.

What else?  Oh yeah: the break.  Small thing, but very needed.  We went on a 15 minute walk for our break.  It was a little chilly out, but he didn’t mind and the dogs loved it.  It wasn’t intense exercise, but at least it got him moving around a bit.

How about our blog visitors and subscribers?  Any of you have any interesting experiences with last Monday’s unit study?

In: unit studies | | #