The activities for children with ADHD that I will explain in this article will allow you to reassure them, help them concentrate and improve their well-being, which will affect the personal and school life of infants.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has not been without controversy. Many have questioned its existence and others argue that its prevalence has grown compared to a few years ago..
It constitutes, together with childhood allergy, the most frequent pathologies within the infantile sector, therefore it offers future research challenges about this disorder.
A good exercise to be able to work the lack of attention that children have is to play Memory. To do this, depending on the age of the child, it can be adapted to their needs and to a different degree of difficulty.
It is about generating cards in pairs (with photographs, drawings, numbers ...). There must be two of the same cards. You can make them yourself, adapting it to the child's tastes, so that it is more interesting..
To do this, after having a lot of pairs of cards, what you should do is shuffle them and place them down.
The game consists in that, with all the cards being shuffled face down and in turns, the child must pick up one of them and look at the drawing there (for example, a car) and then pick up another (which can be, for example, a balloon).
The child must pay attention to the placement of the cards and pay attention to the drawing of each card, so we train the attention deficit.
When on his turn he is able to pick up two cards with the same picture, he keeps them and continues playing. The game ends when all the cards have been raised. And the person who has saved the most pairs of cards wins.
Simón's game also serves to pay attention, which is one of the greatest deficits that children with ADHD present, in addition to working on impulsivity. It is an electronic game in which the color quadrants light up randomly and emit its own sound.
The child must wait for the device to stop executing the sequence and then enter the sequence shown in the correct order. This game allows the child to develop the capacity for self-control and memory.
One of the advantages of this game is that there are different levels, as you get the sequences right, the execution speed increases.
There are also applications for the Tablet that allow you to work in the same way. Some of them are: Neurogames - Effective learning made fun!
They are created by child neuropsychologist Jonathan Reed. Among them we can find the "Impulse control" or "memorize".
One of the games that also serve to work impulsivity is "the Tower". It is a game of physical and mental skill, where participants must take turns removing blocks from a tower and placing them on top until it falls.
This game has one of the advantages of board games, which is the establishment of turns. In addition, the game requires the child to pause for a moment inhibiting his impulsiveness and plan his next move..
The child must carefully remove the piece, thus working on fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination.
Relaxation techniques can be used to reduce hyperarousal in children with ADHD.
For children, for example, the most appropriate may be Koeppen's, which is an adaptation of the famous Jacobson's Relaxation Technique but suitable for children..
Children, in general, tend to be active and playful, but they also need moments of relaxation and calm, and more children who present the symptom of hyperactivity.
Koeppen's relaxation technique is based on tension and relaxation, so that by focusing on different parts of the body (arms, hands, face, nose ...) the children notice the tension and later relaxes it, so that be able to tell the difference.
Mikado is an old and fun game very useful for children with ADHD, since it allows them to work on fine motor skills and impulsivity. This game consists of a group of very thin sticks with colored bands in the corners.
To start playing, all the sticks are joined and placed vertically, dropping them onto a surface. At that moment, and in turns, the game begins.
The sticks will fall in a certain way and sticks must be extracted in turns without the other sticks moving. When all the clubs have been taken, whoever has the most points will be added.
Mindfulness for children is an extremely beneficial activity, since it allows them to work on attention and reduce hyperactivity.
Mindfulness is based on awareness and mindfulness, which allows you to exercise your attention, in addition to achieving a state of calm and well-being that counteracts hyperarousal.
Puzzles, adapted to age, can also be a very fun activity to work with children with ADHD.
The puzzles allow them to focus on a task and work on attention and motor skills.
The straw game is fun and useful for working on attention and impulsivity. To do this, you need continuous paper, a marker, some balls made of paper and a straw..
To do this, we will take continuous paper and draw a curvy road. With the paper balls, we will place them on the road and blowing with the straw we will try to get the child to carry the ball along the road.
A good activity to work with children is to look for objects inside pictures that have many things.
Look for pictures with very complete drawings (for example, a city where there are many buildings, different shops, people on bicycles, animals ...). The more elements the drawing has, the more difficult the task and the more demanding.
It is about encouraging the child to look for certain elements, for example, “how many buildings do you see in the photograph?”, “How many cats are there?”, “Find the bakery”, “find the girls with long hair”.
This will help the child to focus on a task and maintain attention.
Another easy, fun and useful activity to work attention and planning are the mazes.
To do this, get different mazes and with instructions such as "pay attention and remember that you cannot crush the lines on the edge of the maze", "do it calmly and carefully, start here and find the exit of the maze".
The child must pay attention to the task and plan how to do it to find the way out.
A simple activity that allows children to work their attention are maps. You can adapt it to the child's difficulty and it will also allow him to study and review school concepts.
To do this, you only need maps: of the Autonomous Community itself, of the Country, of Europe, of the World or also a globe of the world.
You ask the child in front of the map to find a specific place for you, for example, “find Malaga”, “find Paris”, etc. In this way, the child must pay attention to the task to solve what is being demanded of him..
Physical exercise is a very good activity for children with hyperactivity. To do this, do physical exercise and sports. Points the child to a sport that interests him and allows him to interact with other children.
Also, allow him to do a lot of physical activity: offer him activities where he can move: going to the park, excursions to the park, going rollerblading ...
To work the self-instructions, the premises are "Stop, think and act." It is a cognitive technique that aims to work impulsivity with children.
It is about selecting at the beginning, for example, an inappropriate behavior that is often repeated: "getting up from the table while eating" or "getting up from class while doing an activity".
Self-instructions should be adjusted to each child, seeing what is necessary for each one. They must be said mentally and applied to impulsive behaviors.
For this, self-instructions are useful so that when the child notices the urge to get up, he should think: “Stand up. What do I have to do? Right now I have to be sitting. I can get it. I'm going to be sitting a little longer ".
In this way, it is intended to delay a little more the impulsiveness of doing that behavior at that particular moment.
The Stroop effect is very useful to work impulsivity. It is a task where the color does not correspond to the word.
For example, the word YELLOW is written in red, the word RED is written in blue, or the word GREEN is written in yellow..
It is about the child saying the color in which the word YELLOW is written, that is, it should say "red", but it will tend to read the word, so it must inhibit and say it correctly.
To work on impulsivity, the turtle technique can also be very suitable. We have to tell the child that at certain times, we are going to turn into a turtle and he must know how turtles behave.
They can walk with their head and legs out but when they feel that someone is threatening them, they hide and leave only the shell visible.
We must indicate to them that they can behave in this way. Thus, when he feels that he cannot control himself, he can turn into a turtle and hide inside his shell..
You are urged to think nice things, to let go of anger or unpleasant emotions, and to relax.
To work attention, we can print and laminate many images with different colored drawings. We will print a lot of images or figures in red, others in blue, green, yellow ...
When we go to work with the child, we will mix them all and we will ask him for a series of instructions. For example, "give me only the cards with red objects".
If they are geometric figures (we include large circles, small circles, large blue squares, small green squares ...). We can do all the combinations and we ask the child for specific instructions.
For example: "give me only the small triangles", "give me the big blue circles". Obviously, this task will be adapted to the level of the child.
Bingo is also a very suitable activity to work attention, since we give the child a series of numbers that we read aloud and he, with different cards, must focus his attention to find if he has the number that has been extracted.
If you do not pay attention, it is very easy that you will not be able to follow the game.
Many strategy games allow the child to work on attention and concentration. In this sense, for example, you can use dominoes, tic tac toe, chess or sink the fleet.
Find the differences games are also very useful for working on attention. To do this, we present the child with drawings that are very similar but have small differences and we encourage him to find where the differences are..
In this sense, variations can be made. For example, we establish a starting drawing (a star) and vertically we establish 8 different stars next to it, one or more can be exactly the same and the others with some difference.
We ask the child to find which stars are the same and which are different. This exercise can be done with many different objects.
You can also establish series of numbers, for example: "3 4 5 6" and next to it we can put "3 4 5 6" or "3 5 4 6", "4 7 4 6" and ask the child to select which ones are the same and those that are different.
These tasks are intended for the child to listen carefully to something and then answer some questions that we have asked..
It is worth telling you stories, descriptions, made-up stories, jokes, riddles ... anything we can think of, and then we can ask you questions to focus your attention.
We can also ask you to describe the environment in which you are or different illustrations: where each thing is, the colors, the space in which they are
There are many tasks to complete that allow you to focus your attention. We can present you with an image that is missing a component and your task is to say, indicate or draw what it is.
You may also be presented with some model drawings and a number of incomplete versions of the drawing. Your task is to view and report and then finish the parts until they are identical to the original drawing..
Another useful activity is to order vignettes, for example, since the child has to focus his attention and discover what happens in the story by ordering them.
In ADHD there are deficits in executive functions, so this is what we must take into account when designing activities to work with them.
One of the difficulties, for example, is inhibition. Thus, the subject with ADHD cannot stop acting when he should, cannot interrupt his actions, cannot protect his thinking.
People with ADHD have no internal sense of time, they live in the moment, they are not able to use their past to think about the future and prepare for it.
They also present difficulties in working memory (operative memory), which is what allows us to keep information in our brain when we need it..
On the other hand, regarding internal language, people with ADHD cannot speak to themselves or use language as a guide.
This leads to their inability to follow instructions and rules to do what they are instructed to do, so they will have difficulties in understanding, to understand what they hear, read and see..
With this ability, people are able to predict the probabilities of response, anticipating the consequences in each of the possible variables and finally choose one.
Regarding emotions, children with ADHD show their emotions and desires more than other individuals, so feelings such as anger, frustration and hostility must be controlled and channeled so that their social relationships are healthy.
This explains why there are children with ADHD who will develop Oppositional Defiant Disorder..
Motivation is another key point for understanding this disorder, those who suffer from it cannot motivate themselves, so there is a lack of persistence towards the goal, manifested in the form of a motivation deficit.
The ability to play with oneself mentally is the one used to plan and solve problems.
Children with ADHD have diminished abilities to solve problems. They are not very fluent in their language and actions, and if, for example, we ask them about what they read a few days ago, we will get disconnected thoughts, little organized or without argument..
Here is a video-summary of the main activities:
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