Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD
Focus, starting, and ADHD
Most advice about focus is written for a brain that starts easily. This area is not. It covers what ADHD actually is, how to make a start when starting is the hard part, how to bring a future consequence close enough to feel, and how to stop paying for it in shame.
Narrowed down
3 practicesTheme · Getting assessed and diagnosed
How long you have · Twenty minutes
Approach · Core
For the child who flies off the handle at noise, labels and crowded rooms, with no autism diagnosis in the picture, a free parent completed sensitivity questionnaire will tell you more than another behaviour chart.
It gives you a structured way to describe the reactivity without reaching for a diagnosis the child may not have, and it points at what to change:…
Run the assessment yourself and watch while they work. Under real effort you will see the small movements, the tics and the overflow that never appear in ordinary conversation, and none of it reaches you if a technician or an app does the testing.
Sit where you can see hands and face. Note what happens as the task gets harder: the tongue that comes out, the leg that starts going, the free hand…
Before intensive work ends, turn what you have learned about a child's thinking into things a teacher can actually do on a Tuesday morning. That translation is what decides whether any of the gains survive going back to school.
A profile written for clinicians is no use in a classroom of thirty. Give three or four concrete actions instead: where this child sits, how…