One relatively easy way to have your child practice both executive function and expressive language skills is by asking them to describe things to you. Describing requires the ability to hold an idea about what they're trying to communicate in their head while also having...
Today I worked with a student who said he sometimes didn't get his homework assignments turned in. I asked what he thought kept him from turning in the assignments and he wasn't sure. To help him explore, I wrote down the many steps one has...
At a conference I attended last summer, I learned that as we grow, our ability to plan our time in the future grows. In middle school, students can make plans for events only 1-2 days in the future. If they have struggles with executive function,...
Are you ever confused about whether you add <s> or <es> when making a word plural (e.g., rose/roses, iris/irises, lilac/lilacs)? Or 3rd person singular (e.g., he dribbles the ball, he passes the ball)? Often students are asked to memorize when to use one or the other,...
I'm remembering a couple students' binders from last year - one was full of EVERY paper the student had received over the course of the year. I encouraged the student to pull some papers out, but he was very concerned that the second he pulled...
Here's another question I was asked recently: What happened to the <u> in forty? I have two answers: The long one and the short one. Here's the long answer: First, I have to first explain a couple cool things about the English language. In English, whenever possible,...
Recently, I was asked which games I would recommend for developing Executive Function (EF) skills. Generally, I think any game that involves some amount of strategy is great, whether that strategy is relatively simple (like which stick will you pull during a game of Honeybee...
How do I help a student who is struggling with completing homework? One approach is to discuss the student's goals for their future. This student said they want to go to college and do well in school. After writing that down, I asked the student to...
Building words from a matrix offers so many learning opportunities: practicing adding prefixes and suffixes, investigating word histories, increasing vocabulary, and more. If you reached this page from our 404 page, take a look at the matrix and discover the word sum <err + or --> error>. ...
In a recent session, after having used a flowchart for suffixing patterns, we decided to create our own. There was a lot of revision as we thought of additional word sums that wouldn't be right with our current model. ...