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