Executive Function

Normally at this time of year, I post about our back to school experiences with gifted at AJ’s school. But this year, there’s not a whole lot to tell, at least not yet. They’ve been in school for two weeks now, but there is still not a lot coming home and they are about to launch into round one of standardized testing (STAR and MAP) for the year.

But while I can’t talk much about academics, there is one thing I am definitely happy with about school, and that’s about the way his teacher is teaching study skills.

Like many gifted kids, AJ has some problems with what psychologists like to call “executive function.” To say he is not good at organizing himself is an understatement. He has classic absent-minded-professor syndrome. He forgets things. He loses things. He starts on one task and gets distracted by some shiner more exciting thing in the middle and forgets what he was doing. We have tried and tried to help him with routines and lists but nothing has worked. But this year, things are better, at least as far as schoolwork goes.

There are two reasons that AJ himself has identified for the improvement. One is actually a result of the overcrowded classes: no desks. Because they sit at tables instead of desks, AJ can’t shove stuff in there never to be seen again. Instead of desks, they keep their important stuff in fabric pockets that go over the backs of their chairs. These pockets are small and you can see everything in them, so there’s nowhere for things to hide. Most supplies are shared by the tables, so they are stored in a shared space and don’t get lost either.

The second tool, though, is something that is actually part of the curriculum: The Binder. The binder organizes all their school work. The teacher talks to them about it, let them decorate the cover, and showed them how to put it together. It’s an awesome tool. But mostly I just love that the teacher is backing up what we try to do at home. In the past, we’ve given AJ a calendar and a folder system to help him remember his homework, but without the teacher helping him with it at school, it failed.

The front pocket is for parent-teacher communication only. Inside the 3 rings, there is a zip pocket for money – both the real money that goes back and forth to school and the fake money that AJ’s teacher uses for certain types of rewards. We’re not quite sure what happens with the fake money yet, but AJ is already loaded. After the pocket are several pages of sheet protectors containing the monthly lunch menu, the weekly spelling list, and any other lists of terms to be studied. Next is an assignment book with a page for every week. Each day, the students write in their homework in each subject and other due dates and tests. Each time they finish an assignment, they check it off. Parents sign off on it weekly. After the assignment is a red Velcro pocket folder. This is where the daily assignments travel home to get completed and put back in the folder for the return trip. After this are several divided sections, each with its own stash of lined paper. So far these haven’t been much used, except for the daily journal section, which includes a story the class is writing one sentence at a time each day and a sheet protector with a list and explanation of the parts of speech on one side and a list of proofreading marks on the other.

Thanks to this binder, AJ always knows where his homework is and we always know what he’s supposed to do. It’s not up to his memory. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful now, and it will be even more wonderful when he heads to middle school next year and has more responsibilities.

How about you, parents/teachers: do your children struggle with organization? What are some of the tools in your box?

First Day of Challenge Program

The challenge program began yesterday and AJ seems to have had a good time, although it all seemed kind of vague to him. There is one other 3rd grader in the program -- his friend C, who also sits next to him in class and is in his Cub Scout den AND on his baseball team. It's lucky C and AJ are friends, because they're sure going to see a lot of each other the next few months. Like AJ, C qualified in both reading and math, so the two of them work with the gifted coordinator for both subjects every Monday afternoon from 1:30-3:15, when school gets out.

AJ was unclear on what he'd be doing. He said they played a bunch of reading and math games yesterday, but was vague about what exactly they did. My guess is that the coordinator was trying to get to know them and get a read on how they worked. She told them that they'd get a book to work on next week. AJ thinks there may be homework that will be assigned through his regular classroom.

I'm interested in how this is all going to pan out. This is very different from the kind of pull-out programs I was involved with in several different school systems in the 1970s and 80s. Back then the focus was on critical and creative thinking, not on curriculum. The stuff we did in G&T was completely separate and in addition to classroom work. I loved it. It was fun. And we rarely had much homework. But it always seemed kind of unfair to me, because a lot of the things we did (e.g. interview Anne Morrow Lindbergh on her writing habits, write stories using a wacky collection of required elements) seemed like they could have worked for most people I knew and they probably could have got something out of it. In reality, that may or may not have been true. But this sense of gifted programs as extra-curricular has been problematic, because it makes them easier for school districts to cut if they don't look necessary.

At AJ's school, there is a concerted effort to both integrate the gifted work with the regular classroom work and also, when possible, to have it substitute for regular classroom work, instead of being extra. This keeps the kids from feeling punished by having an extra class and also, at least theoretically, provides more continuity for the kids as they move through the grades.

In addition, AJ came home with his first set of homework of the year. The math homework was laughable, but AJ enjoyed it. There are many things I love about the Everyday Mathematics curriculum, but the assignments where children have to find numbers around the house are not my favorites. AJ likes getting up from his table, and that's fine, but he had nearly identical assignments when he was in preschool. By third grade, shouldn't they be doing something more with the numbers they find? Apparently not.

The at-home reading program is a little different this year. Instead of assigning an amount of time to read each day (last year it was 15 minutes) and reporting on the books, which aggravated AJ to no end, there is a total number of minutes for the month (400, or 20 minutes a day 5 days a week). The kids log their minutes and book titles and that's it. This will work much better for AJ. It allows for adjustments from day to day depending on activities. Reporting once a month instead of once a week will take the pressure off. And it's exactly the same system the public library reading programs use, so he's used to it.

In addition, there is a new reading assignment. Every Monday there is a page of reading sent home along with a worksheet. AJ is supposed to read it out loud to a parent and then answer questions about what he read. The reading that came home this week was not difficult, but AJ is not always great at gleaning information from what he reads in any kind of organized fashion, so I think these assignments may help him with that.

We've been spending a lot of time talking about organization which for AJ, as for many gifted kids, is a huge challenge. He has trouble getting his chores done on time because he gets distracted by his books and magazines as he's putting them away or wanders off into play before he finishes getting dressed. He gets lost in thought while eating meals and has trouble finishing them. And he regularly forgets his homework.

This year, I decided to make organization a priority for us. I let AJ pick out a school planner (he chose this one) and showed him how to set it up and write things in it. He is responsible for taking it to school each day and bringing it home each night. If he forgets, there is a set of consequences. For the first couple of weeks, I'm going to show him how to track his work. After that, he'll be on his own. My goal is to make him more independent with his homework. I expect there to be a bit of a learning curve, but I'm hoping letting him make choices of how to write things down and giving him stickers to decorate his calendar pages when he does things well will keep him on track. I'll let you know how it goes.

Parent-teacher conferences

At our first parent-teacher conference of the year last week, AJ’s teacher Mrs. F handed us a packet of grade 3 and 4 math worksheets that AJ has been assigned to work on when everyone else is doing the regular curriculum. “I’m not sure why he’s having trouble with this,” Mrs. F. said. “It shouldn’t be hard for him. But I find him just sitting there staring at it and not doing it. I even asked him to put a star on the pages he thought were hard and a smiley face on the pages that were easy. But he starred some of the easiest pages.” I told her we’d go over it with him over break and I’d try to get to the bottom of it.

AJ is starting to struggle with the format of school. His teacher this year is much more structured than any he’s had before. I get the impression that he feels like he’s always doing the wrong thing, but I haven’t yet figured out why. His teacher, who is trying to do everything she can to help him, is truly frustrated and perplexed. His test scores are off the charts, but he is having trouble with a number of class activities.

We had trouble working on math over break, a subject that AJ has always dearly loved. But every time we’d sit down to try to look at it, AJ would burst into tears. I have been trying so hard not to let it come to this point. My own love of math was squashed by a clueless (and downright mean) teacher in the second grade. This is what I’ve been afraid of. But eventually, we were able to get past the tears and into the problems. And AJ started to have fun again.


This morning, I sat down and wrote a long email to Mrs. F.:

AJ and I went over the math packet over break and I tried to get a sense of what had made him star some pages. He also worked on a few pages on his own and we talked them through afterwards. After looking more carefully at the packets, AJ decided that it was all pretty easy for him but mostly not so incredibly easy as to be boring (except for the time pages, at which he rolled his eyes).

I think his stars say more about his difficulty understanding instructions, both those you gave him on starring things, and also the ones on the starred worksheets. He said they are easy now that he knows what they are, but that he didn't know what things like "expanded notation" meant at first. [AJ’s class curriculum is the somewhat controversial Everyday Math program; the packet is drawn from the much more standard Spectrum series; the presentation and some terminology is markedly different.]

He also isn't clear on what the "show your work boxes" are for [each problem has a space on the right margin marked “show your work” -- are they required or are they just there when he needs them? Because he does a lot of the work in his head, if he needs to show his work, someone might need to show him what that means. I did talk to him about how he will at least at some point, need to demonstrate how he figured things out (we talk about this a lot at home, so that shouldn't be a total surprise to him, but he's not used to writing it, and he may balk at it because it slows him down). You'll see how he tried to fill in the "show your work" columns on some of the pages and I think it will give you a good window into how his math brain works. For example, On Lesson 2.3 of the Spectrum Math grade 3 (page 22), the first question gives digits for the various places and he has to figure out what number it spells. The number is 600,903, which he got correctly. In the "show your work" section, he wrote out the number, and then wrote the numbers for each place squished in underneath each digit(100,000, 10,000, etc.). Below that, he wrote "3x3=9" with arrows connecting the 3 and 9 with their twins in 600,903. Then he wrote "3x2=6" and drew arrows between the 3s and 6s. He told me that he thought it was cool that you could make all the digits out of 3, so he decided to show that. Further down the page, where he had to write biggest and smallest numbers made with the digits, he ended up writing the (correct) answers in the "show your work" column and leaving the answer blanks blank. He was so worried about showing his work, that he forgot to write the answers where they were supposed to go.

But AJ also wasn't sure what "hard" meant -- from his perspective, it was too vague. He doesn't always deal well with grey areas. I explained it to him as "hard is something you don't know how to do by yourself and you need someone to show you how to do it." By that definition, the only stars that remained were on the "expanded notation" pages. And once he figured out what that meant, then those stars disappeared as well.

Based on this, I'd like to see him gaining more independence on worksheets like this, being able to carefully read and figure out the instructions for himself. But I also think he may need some spoken words about what to do before each one. It's not so much that he gets it wrong all the time, but that he doesn't trust himself to be getting it right. He seems to expect that he's going to do it incorrectly and wants reassurance.

The other thing it seems like he needs work on, is interpreting word problems. There weren't actually too many examples of that in the packet, but he doesn't trust himself to turn the word problems into equations a lot of the time. He wants constant reassurance. And when the word problems involve subtraction or division, he doesn't always get the order right.

And, perhaps most important, overall, defining things with almost comic precision helps him out a lot. If there is an exception of any kind, he will find it and be confused by it. He hasn't yet learned the psychology of figuring out what the question is asking by what makes sense, not just what is literally stated.

I think, although I’m not certain, that his teacher is turning him loose with extra work and is not willing or able to spend much time explaining things to him. And I know that AJ is not always willing or able to get up in the middle of class and go ask his teacher what he needs to know. His class is very large and, as generally happens, those who are struggling to work at grade level get more attention than those who are working too far above grade level. But all second graders need help and personal attention, no matter what level they’re at. None of them is independent yet. I didn’t want to come right out and say, “pay more attention to my kid,” because I know she’s doing what she can. But at the same time, she needs and wants to know how to help him. I hope I was diplomatic enough while also being clear.

One foot in front of the other

Last Friday was the day I volunteer in the library at AJ's school. It was an unusually quiet day. The librarian was working with her classes in the computer lab down the hall. No one was coming in to check out books. I had plenty of time to check in all the returned books, reshelve them, and scan the shelves for Christmas, Hanukah and Kwanzaa books to pull for the post-Thanksgiving displays. AJ's teacher came in while I was covering some new paperback books.

"Don't worry! I did give him the book! I just was worried about him being able to keep track of his work," she said. This was excellent news. And we proceeded to have a long talk about what's up with AJ.

The fact is, some of what is going on is still a mystery to both of us. I don't think we're talking about a learning disability here, although I'm not ruling it out. Nor am I ignoring research on learning disabilities related to "executive functioning" (thanks for the new term, Fern!), because regardless of the cause, the symptoms need addressing and some of the suggestions freshhell mentioned are excellent and already working well for us. Last year we bought AJ a small chalkboard that we use specifically for his schedule. It used to live in the kitchen where Mr. Spy or I would write out first his morning and then his afternoon schedule along with some silly pictures and jokes so that it was something he wanted to look at as well as something he needed to know. Recently, we've moved the chalkboard to his room and had him write out his schedule and then cross off the activities as he does them. This is both teaching him how to help himself and allowing us to see what he's doing. It's the number one best tool we have for keeping AJ on track at home.

But the reason I suspect it isn't actually a learning disability (and I really think it may be too early to tell) is that a lot of the problems are situational -- they take place in school and to a lesser extent in certain situations at home (usually on tasks he doesn't want to do when there's some other activity he wants to move on to as fast as possible). They are not universal behaviors. I think there are some triggers for the behavior, though, and boredom is definitely one of them. A lack of respect for the activity is another -- writing the assignment is important, putting it away neatly is not. I am sensitive to these issues, because I was the same way when I was in elementary school. Once it was done in my head, it was done. The rest of it didn't matter to me -- writing neatly, putting things in my backpack so they didn't wrinkle, even doing the assignment on paper. It didn't matter. I would willfully fail to show my work in math because I thought it was a waste of time, no matter what anybody else told me. I would fail to answer questions in English class because I got carried away with my answer to the first question and wanted to see where it would take me. It wasn't that I couldn't get organized, it was that I didn't really care. I wanted to do the right thing and I tried when people asked me to, but at a gut level, I didn't get why it was important. It appears to me that AJ is showing signs of a similar attitude problem. And while such an attitude problem is one he needs to know how to solve to get through a lot of real life situations, I think the attitude itself may eventually serve him well when channeled for good instead of evil.

At school, AJ is easily distracted by other children. He's often overstimulated by a lot of activity, even as he's attracted to it, and he always wants to know what else is going on. When he's working, he likes things quiet and still. He doesn't get that at school. And he likes it that way -- he's a very social kid and he wants to interact with others. But at 7, he still doesn't have the self-control needed to be consistent about his in-class work habits. I am not concerned that he doesn't yet know how to do this. I am concerned that he doesn't seem to be understanding that learning how to do this is extremely important. But working on him both from home and from school, I am hoping it will try to sink in.

From the beginning, we've been focused on helping AJ learn how to organize himself. Fern mentioned trying to talk out loud to AJ about how I'm organizing things as I do it. This sounds like an excellent idea. And while I think I've always done some of it, I bet I could do more. He has the ability to organize when he wants to -- woe betide he who messes with the elaborate ordering of his baseball cards! He just doesn't like to take the time to think about it, because, I think, he gets overwhelmed with possibilities. I need to try to help him take that part of his brain that deals with his baseball cards and apply it to other things.

Jill mentioned that her son's teacher had handed out an agenda/planner to each kid to help them keep track of their homework assignments, which had to be initialed in the planner each day. This gave me an idea. I stressed with AJ's teacher how lists seemed to work for AJ at home but that when we tried to have him write lists for school, that he ran into the same problems he did with other assignments -- he often forgot it or didn't do it. I suggested that I could write up a checklist -- one page for a week -- that we could tape to the front of his take-home folder, so he could run through it each day, a list of all the things he needed to remember during class. I told the teacher I'd be happy to make it, but that I needed her help for what to put on it, since I didn't know all the routines of the classroom. She agreed that it sounded like a good thing to try and she's going to think about things to put on it and get them to me. So I feel like we're on the same page about this and that she will try to back some of this stuff up in school.

The other issue that his teacher is worried about is the damage AJ occasionally inflicts through his carelessness -- ripping books by shoving things into his desk without looking to see where they are going, absent-mindedly spearing his pencil at the desk, leaving marks and holes, bending back the covers of a book he's engrossed in. I'm not sure what to do about this beyond drawing his attention to it and asking him to be careful, which we've already done many times over. I did, though, suggest to AJ that he should pull out the stack of things in his desk, put the thing he wants to put away on top, and then put the hole thing back in. Part of his trouble is that there's way too much stuff in his desk. But he can't really do much about that. It's just the way things are when there are 27 kids in a class and there's nowhere to put anything. And I suggested to the teacher that there should be consequences for the damage at school, just as there would be at home -- a missed 10 minutes of recess, for example, which is a standard punishment for misbehavior in the classroom. As Jeanne mentioned, if the behaviors start causing more trouble for him, I think AJ will get it.

So it was a productive conversation all around. Our parent-teacher conference is a week from today, so we will have a chance to follow up quickly. And from there, we'll see how things go. Thank you so much for all of your comments and suggestions. I'll report back next week.