Lack Organization? Help is Here

Is your child's backpack a nightmare? Food, loose tattered  papers, old school notices? Many people think of organization skills as the ability to keep things in order. But people  use organizational  skills to keep their thoughts in order so they can retrieve information and use it effectively. National Center for Learning  Disabilities (NCLD) has some enlightening articles. Here's one.

Kids who have weak organization skills struggle with handling information effectively. They  struggle with setting priorities, making plans, sticking to a task and getting things done. The older your child gets, the more important these skills are. Here are four ways kids use organization skills to learn.

Organization and Following Directions

Following through on directions requires kids to do two things: focus on what needs to be done and come up with a game plan to do it. Both of these require mental organization and planning. Kids with strong organization skills  plan steps to get something done without even thinking about it.

If your child has weak organization skills, she may not be able to see the steps in directions or even know where to start.

Organization and Learning to Read

Kids use organization skills in subtle ways when first learning to read. Phonics (connecting sounds to letters) requires kids to store the uppercase and lowercase version of a letter together with the sound (or sounds) that letter makes. Whenever kids see a letter, they can pull out the sound that goes with it. The filing system becomes more complicated when kids start recognizing sight words (common words kids memorize by how they look) and need to match them to images of what they stand for.

If your child struggles with organization, she may have trouble retrieving the necessary information to connect letters or groups of letters to sounds.

Organization and Literacy Learning

Literacy (reading, writing and grammar skills)  requires kids to keep track of many things at once: characters and their relationships, plot, sequences of events, supporting details and the main idea. Nonfiction requires keeping track of subject-specific vocabulary.

If your child struggles with organization she may not be able to gather all that information and organize it. And if she has to stop and look up words while reading, she may not be able to pick up where she left off.

Organization and Learning Math

Kids have to use organization skills to learn math because it’s a very organized subject. There are rules and procedures to follow all along the way. Math also involves organizing information based on relationships, such as sorting things into groups by size, color or shape. As math gets more abstract, many kids with organization issues have trouble keeping up because they can’t create their own categories for sorting the information.

Organization skills are also needed to solve word problems using clue words (such as fewer than to mean subtraction) to help sort through information.

If your child has organization issues, being able to store and retrieve rules and facts can be challenging.

Good news. What can you do?

• Tools like checklists and planners can help kids get more organized.
• Clean out backpack regularly.
• Weak organization skills can make learning harder, but not impossible.
• Ask you child's teacher for suggestions.

Read the complete article: 

    http://www.ncld.org/types-learning-disabilities/executive-function-disorders/ways-kids-use-organization-skills-to-learn?utm_source=newsletter_april_29_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_content=dearreaderimage&utm_campaign=ldnews

Courage and Self-Confidence Building

The preoccupation with children's safety  has changed childhood. Now a counter-move is arising based on the statistics that today's parenting is doing more harm than good.

Imagine a playground with filthy mattresses, piles of used tires, and mud! Would you allow your child to play here? Probably not. These playgrounds became popular in the UK in the 1940's as a what  Lady Marjory Allen called "asphalt square" playgrounds.  She wanted to encourage "free and permissive atmosphere with as little adult supervision as possible.. She believed  that kids  should face "really dangerous risks" and then conquer them alone. How much time does your child spend unsupervised?  This is what builds self-confidence and courage.

It's hard to believe that parenting norms have shifted so much in one generation.  Today, third graders walking to school alone and  playing ball in the street are unheard of in my neighborhood. Parents sit at the corner of my street and wait --- in their cars ----  for the school bus to come, pick up the kids,  and deliver them  to the school less located less than half a mile away! Absurd. In 1971, 80% of third graders walked  to school alone. By 1990, that figure dropped to 10%. Now it's even lower. 

We have gone too far, says Joe Frost. "Reasonable risks are essential for children's healthy development." We are saying that our kids are unintelligent or too fragile to asses the risk of any given situation. We are raising kids to be fearful and with increased levels of psychology. Peter Gray, A Boston College professor wrote The Play Deficit and  attributes the millennials' list of ills including depression, narcissism and a decline in empathy, as a result of the lost of the old childhood culture. The percentage of college aged kids taking psychiatric meds has spiked.

Remember you can not create the perfect environment nor can you create the perfect child. Crime rates are NOT higher today than they were a generation ago except for child abduction by a family member possibly to to the high rate of divorce.

So encourage active independent play in your child. Remember your childhood?

April is Autism Awareness Month.. Learn the Signs

The following "red flags" may indicate your child is at risk for an autism spectrum disorder. If your child exhibits any of the following, please don’t delay in asking your pediatrician or family doctor for an evaluation:

• No big smiles or other warm, joyful expressions by six months or thereafter
• No back-and-forth sharing of sounds, smiles or other facial expressions by nine months
• No babbling by 12 months
• No back-and-forth gestures such as pointing, showing, reaching or waving by 12 months
• No words by 16 months
• No meaningful, two-word phrases (not including imitating or repeating) by 24 months
• Any loss of speech, babbling or social skills at any age

early intensive behavioral intervention improves learning, communication and social skills in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD)

On March 27, 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new data on the prevalence of autism in the United States. This surveillance study identified 1 in 68 children (1 in 42 boys and 1 in 189 girls) as having autism spectrum disorder (ASD). 

.http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/learn-signshttp://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/learn-signs