Mertzon Homeschooling Resources for Home Schoolers

Are your kids or students struggling with paying attention? Here are 18 tips to help a student with attention problems!

Give them tools. Let them experience many good things. Life is more than math facts and history dates. Education is more than books, though I love books! Field trips can bring education to life.

You don’t need to spend money.

Visit a forest or field with a field guide from the library. Visit a museum—most have a free admission day at least once a month. If not, ask if they have special rates for schools and homeschools.

Look for work experiences, too. My son worked as an apprentice re-enactor at a colonial-era farm, and learned valuable lessons about speaking to visitors, 18^th century farm life, and what to do when foreign visitors try to picnic in the field where the bull is pastured!

2. Focus on developing their talents and strengths.

When your child’s mind wanders, when your teen cannot sit still, when they won’t stop talking, or it’s hard for them to focus, it’s also hard for you to focus on their talents. But look for opportunities to build on strengths.

3. When you are teaching your inattentive child, keep the work sessions short.

Let’s say you’re going to try to help your child with spelling or math facts. If your child can only focus for 10 minutes on spelling, teach it for 8 minutes, then take a break. Need more study time? Have two short sessions, and break in between them.

4. Give short breaks where you stand, stretch, sing, tell jokes for a moment.

Boredom can be a stem of attention problems. Chris Dendy says that laughter stimulates blood circulation, helping attention.

Push-ups, run laps around the house, jumping jacks, and so on. Calisthenics have the advantage of not being so much fun that the child will want to prolong the break.

6. Incorporate movement in lessons

My son reviewed math facts while bouncing on a mini-trampoline. When reviewing memory work, we did one push-up for every word wrong. He loved it when I had to do push-ups.

Accommodate the place in your home where your child does schoolwork. First, adapt their seating.

7. The chair should be short enough for the child’s legs to reach the floor.

You can strap a small bungee cord across the front legs of the chair so the child can push his calves against it.

If a child tends to wiggle, you can let them:

8. Stand at a tall table.

9. Sit on exercise balls, a.k.a. yoga balls.

Children (and adults) will need to work their core muscles more to keep their balance, and that will burn off excess movement and help them focus. There are special ball seats made that have legs or rollers to keep the ball from going across the room.

If those are too expensive, try making a T-stool, a one-legged stool shaped like a capital T. Like an exercise ball, it forces the sitter to move their legs and core muscles to shift weight and stay balanced. In her book, The Out-of-Sync Child Has Fun, Carol Kranowitz tells how to make a T-stool out of two-by-four.

11. Remember that as homeschoolers, you don’t have to make your child sit for everything.

My son did fifth-grade math under the dining room table. While homeschooled, a naval aviator I know studied one year of middle school math standing at the kitchen table, bouncing occasionally—perhaps unconsciously preparing for landings on rolling ships.

Work with your child to see what distracts them most, and help them fight it.

12. Minimize visual distractions with study carrels.

You can make one out of a tri-fold board (the kind people use for science fair projects) or, for the more bouncy students, use a large appliance box, which is more stable. Or you can buy a study carrel. Resist the urge to decorate the inside of the carrel too much. Keep it simple.

If you have a have one room in your home where you do most of your homeschooling, make sure it is not visually distracting. Don’t paper the walls with educational posters and images.

13. If the view outside is distracting, sheer curtains or blinds can keep your child from staring out the window every minute.

Or try moving their seats so they can’t see out a window. Our first year homeschooling, I was glad we had just moved off a busy street into the woods.

We started homeschooling at the kitchen table, looking out into the backyard. I looked out the window and saw a peaceful forest. My son looked out the same window and started watching squirrels and birds.

Try giving the child earplugs. You may need to try several brands to find something comfortable.

Other kids and teens actually concentrate better when they can listen to certain kinds of music.

Because I’ve very attuned to words, music with lyrics distracts me completely—even instrumental music if I know the lyrics. But everyone is different. Try different kinds of music to see what helps your child focus.

Headphones help keep that music from distracting you and the child’s siblings.

15. If smells are very distracting, remove scented objects like potpourri and scented candles.

Consider also what cleaning products you are using, which may have distracting fragrances. I recommend you visit SaferChemicals.org for suggestions on eliminating toxins and allergens from your home.

16. If your child’s main sources of distraction are in his or her head, earplugs and study carrels won’t help.

I just read Richard Lavoie’s book, The Motivation Breakthrough. On pages 298–299, he suggests this behavior modification idea: make a recording where the only sounds are either a beep at random intervals of 30 seconds to 4 minutes. (You can use a chime or clicker instead, but choose one sound for the whole recording.) Make the recording 30–60 minutes long—longer than your child’s independent work sessions are.

Then when it’s time for your child to work, give the child a spare piece of paper and tell them to start work. Every time she hears the chime or beep, she should stop work for a second and mark an X on the paper if she’s been working or an O if she’s been distracted. Lavoie says this has been very effective for his students in helping them learn to improve their focus. I just read this; let me know if it helps you.

17. Let your child use fidgets.

A fidget is something to keep your hands busy so you can concentrate better. You could use a squeeze ball, a chain of paper clips, an artist’s eraser, a piece of putty, a piece of string, or many of the products made for this purpose.

Train your children to monitor which fidgets work for them, and which are merely distracting. A fidget is working when it improves the student’s performance. If it distracts them, you, or others around them, it’s not working.

What works for one child may not work for another. One mother I interviewed for Homeschooling Your Struggling Learner reported that her son could concentrate better on the history book she was reading aloud to him if she let him play with Legos. They probably would have distracted many other kids.

I like the suggestions in Is Your Child Hyperactive? Inattentive? Impulsive? Distractible? by Steven and Marianne Garber and Robyn Spizman.

To learn more, attend “Helping Distractible Students Succeed,” one of my workshops at the Great Homeschool Conventions in 2017. Visit my website, LearnDifferently.com, for more resources, including the handout for the talk, “Helping Distractible Students Succeed.”