Building Habits for Success
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Evaluates your child’s executive functioning skills / abilities
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Creates a plan to assist your child with making gradual improvements
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Teaches skills for pushing through resistance and taking steps forward
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Promotes growth in specific areas assessed
One or more of following skills are targeted for improvement:
Organization and Planning
Strategies are taught to enhance your child’s ability to follow a plan, manage task demands, develop and follow steps for meeting goals, use a planner, and attend carefully to deadlines. Organization and time management are key skills that are taught in this area.
Initiation or Getting Started
Your child will be taught to recognize when they are resisting doing work or chores and how to break through it. He or she will learn to use verbal medition and goal setting as tools, and to break tasks down into parts.
Monitoring Work and Behavior
Enhancing of monitoring skills involves learning to work carefully, understanding one’s behavior and choices and their outcomes, using skills to pay attention to these factors, and learning new, more adaptive behaviors.
Flexibility or Shifting gears- Getting "unstuck"
If your child tends to get stuck in an unproductive loop of thinking or behavior, he or she can learn to recognize it and take steps to shift and change. Here, awareness is key before the child can make a strong effort to pause and rethink their point of view or behavior.
Working Memory and Following Multiple Steps
Whether holding onto information mentally as part of doing schoolwork or following multiple steps for getting chores done, your child can learn to focus more deeply, use mnemonics and active learning strategies, and develop a structured approach for completing tasks and projects.
Self Control - "Putting on the Brakes!" and Managing Emotions
When children behave impulsively, they usually end up feeling unhappy with themselves, so this is an important area for change. Your child can be taught to slow down, recognize triggers, and learn tools for managing impulses and emotions. Strategies can be practiced until the child feels more in control.
By evaluating a child’s executive functioning skills or abilities, the teachers at MSK are able to put in place a plan to assist the child with making gradual, notable improvements in such skills as organization, time management, and emotional control by shaping behavior in positive directions and creating effective habits.
Children are taught skills for pushing through resistance, gaining self-control, persevering though hard work, and actively monitoring their own progress so that they become owners of their own goals and outcomes.
Your child will work with a teacher trained in understanding executive functioning skills and how to promote growth in specific areas assessed.