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For children and
teens, writing the daily schedule and displaying it
prominently is very helpful because it helps the
child or teen see where they're up to and reduces
any stress associated without having to actually
remember what to do next. As example of applying
this at school and in the home:
- Teachers can
check off each item on the blackboard throughout
the day and edit the schedule to point
out/highlight changes in the usual
routine.
- Parents can
create a visual list or organizer for and teach
the child to consult it each day, check off
items that are completed, look at it frequently
throughout the day, etc.
As children get
older, their schools frequently provide them with
planners or agendas. Not all planners work for
students with large sloppy handwriting, so do
consider whether you need to look for another type.
Similarly, consider whether the planner shows one
day at a time or one week at a time.
The image below is
from the author's "Good Ideas Gone Horribly
Horribly Bad File."
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By a few
weeks into the school year, the student
was still trying to enter homework
assignments, but the planner was becoming
more visually confusing.
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The teacher wanted
the student to be able to look ahead so that he
wasn't surprised to turn the page and find out he
had a test that day, so she picked a "weekly view"
planner. The idea was fine, but the plan didn't
work because (1) it didn't allow enough space for
the student's very large handwriting, and (2) the
parent and teacher tried to use the page for their
communications. In general, it's usually best to
keep parent-teacher communications in a separate
notebook or folder.
Visual cues can also
serve as reminders of events or steps we might
neglect. Dornbush and Pruitt (1995) provide visual
cues or editing strips that can be pasted on young
students' desks (see their book,"Teaching the
Tiger," published by Hope Press). These strips
contain pictorial representations of steps in the
editing process such as checking punctuation,
checking for capitalization, etc. That concept of
providing visual cues can be applied in the home
even with young children to help them learn
routines or "chunks" of behavior. As one
example: a "morning" strip could have images
of a child going to the bathroom, brushing their
teeth, washing their hands, etc. The visual cue
strip can be posted in the bathroom (demonstrating
the principles that you put the reminder or cue
where the child is likely to see it and where the
child needs it) and the child can check off each
activity as it's done.
Another way in which
visual organizers are particularly helpful in the
area of thought or idea organization. If your child
has trouble writing a big paper or essay or
organizing his thoughts for a presentation, have
you ever tried a visual organizer? Inspiration.com
provides software for children and teens that you
may wish to explore or download for a free
trial.
Color, used properly,
can also be an organizing aid. If you're not
already using this technique in the classroom or at
home, consider using color to organize materials.
Color code school books so that all "science"
books, workbooks, and notebooks are one color,
while all "social studies" books and materials are
another color. At the end of the day, if the
student has science homework, they just grab
everything that is the science color. It saves a
lot of time and increases the chances of the right
workbooks and notebooks coming home. When I was in
a school recently observing a student,
I commented to the teacher that the use of
color-coding notebooks seemed to be working well in
her class. She informed me that the color-coding
system was now being used building-wide. What a
great idea! Once a student learns that "science is
blue," they stick with that color code throughout
all of their years in the school.
Color-coding
notebooks and/or textbooks works even more
effectively if the classroom teacher also uses
color coding for corresponding bins where the
students turn in their work (e.g., all science
homework would get put in the blue bin, all
language arts in the green bin, etc.). [Because
some children may be color blind, adding easily
discriminable shapes to the bins and notebooks may
be helpful in some cases.]
Color can also be
used to help prioritize, another executive
function. Teach the student to color highlight
information as they study, and establish a
different meaning for each color (e.g., yellow for
definitions, green for facts,
etc....).
In the home or on the
job, color can also be a useful technique to help
prioritize. As one example, Post-its come in
different colors and can be used to tag work or
messages that are high priority, low priority,
etc.
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Cognitive cues are strategies
that help the individual remember the sequence of
steps as well as the content or steps themselves.
They are especially important to those who can't
seem to retain or follow multi-step or
multi-element situations.
When you wanted to learn the
order of the planets from the sun, did you develop
a sentence (mnemonic) that preserved the order of
the planets, as in "My Very Educated Mother Just
Sent Us Nine Pizzas" (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto)? What
other mnemonics have you used over the years to
help you remember the sequence of items? And what
are you doing to help your child or student develop
useful mnemonics?
Mnemonics are an example of a
cognitive strategy or cue. And whereas young
children may need or benefit from pictorial editing
strips, older students might be taught mnemonics
for editing such as "CLIPS" (Packer, 1999), where
"CLIPS" reminds them to check for: Capitalization,
Leave space between words, Ideas complete,
Punctuation, Spelling. At the beginning, you can
leave a few paper clips on the desk with a reminder
as to what the mnemonic stands for. Later on, you
can just leave a few clips on the desk.
Providing your child with
mnemonics or cognitive strategies will help them
retain the sequence of steps. If you can teach them
a general strategy that whenever they have a
multi-step task, they should try to develop a
mnemonic, you will be teaching them a lifelong
strategy. And the funnier or wackier the mnemonic,
the more likely they will remember it.
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