Tuesday, June 1, 2010

4 minutes plus their age

I would like to share something that I wrote last year and then add a little more with some thoughts that I have.

 My son just is starting kindergarten and it is different to watch him grow up now and send him off to school. The past two days I have taken him to school and picked him up, what an experience. It really is good, kind of scary as well. today I walked him to the front doors and let him go to his classroom by himself. As well I have had the opportunity to watch my little girl while my wife is canning. This is also a great experience, pretty demanding though. What a great opportunity I have, I hope I don't take it for granted.

What I would like to share today is something that I have learned even more here in the last couple days, helping my little boy with homework. The attention span that children have. In school a good teacher should be changing their teaching technique or topic almost every 20 minutes. That is right almost every 20 minutes, and for young kids it is even more often than that. So when you are helping you child out with their homework at home done force them to do it for hours on end. You will get better results if they work really hard for 20 minutes take a break (even a 5 min. break) and then go back to working. This is for any child, even for ones that have no learning disability.


addition today
Ok lets up date this a little.  The attention span that your child has is about 4 minutes longer than their age.   4 yr old =8 minutes of focus    6yr old=10 minutes of focus.  this is really strong concentrating focus.   So if you are helping your kid with home work, or working with them through the summer, remember that their attention span isn't very long and changing directions will help.  This doesn't mean work for 10 minutes and take a break.  Have them read a book for ten minutes and then work on flash cards for a few.  You will get the hang of it and see how productive it is.

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