11 Tips on Teaching Students with ADD
Juggling the teaching curriculum, energetic students and individual students needs can be difficult at the best of times. Throw in some kids with learning difficulties and you've got yourself a real challenge.
Here are eleven tips to cater for students with learning difficulties:
1. Provide an outline to ADHD students with key concepts or vocabulary prior to lesson presentation.
2. ADHD kids are easily bored, even by you. Increase your teaching speed a little - but be mindful of when it's too much. Include a variety of activities during each lesson appropriate to elementary school.
3. Engage students with muti-sensory teaching material but be aware that too much audio-visual material can be distracting for ADD students. Use entertaining photos, pictures, sounds and noises that are related to the teaching material.
4. Make lessons brief or break longer presentations into discrete segments.
5. A great lesson or presentation should aim to involve ALL students actively. You can engage espcially difficult students by asking them to help the class and make notes on the board.
6. Ask your attention deficit students to form mental images of the topics you're talking about. Your students can share their images with each other so you can be sure that they're visualizing the teaching material.
7. Engage students by addressing them directly, making them answer questions, or respondign with handsignals.
8. Novel ways of teaching, such as role playing, can be very enaging for students, especially if they have attention difficutlies. I have taught ADD ADHD students the history of the Revolutionary War in the parking lot of the school, using cars, trees, and other objects to represent events and places in history. This can work well.
9. Let your creativity loose! It's hard to keep students engaged, no matter how good a teacher you are. By considering that you actually motivate and entertain your students, your teaching style will become more engaging. Kids will learn much better when they are interested and excited about a topic. Enjoy what you're teaching and be excited!
10. ADD and ADHD students will be more responsive if they are stimulated and engaged in the situation. Mix your teaching style up by varying pitch, tone and speed of voice. This will keep your students engaged.
11. Your ADD ADHD elementary school aged student would probably find lessons that emphasize "hands-on" activities highly engaging.
If your challenged students do fall behind in the classroom, it may be worth investigating other options to increase their learning ability.
About the Author
To help students with learning difficulties catch up to the curriculum, learning software may help. For more information visit http://www.readingdifficulties.org
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