Practices

If a young person hears your suggestion of a planner as one more instruction, they will refuse it, and the refusal is about who is in charge rather than about diaries. Hand over the choice of format and the choice of what goes in.

It helps to be plain that this is theirs and not a monitoring device. That means not reading it over their shoulder and not producing it as evidence…

Anything with more than one step gets written down, and the child does the writing. Ten problems, check them against the answers, correct what is wrong: three lines in their own hand.

A handout would carry the same words, but writing it themselves does two extra things. It puts the sequence somewhere they can look again when step…

Put the rules up on the wall where everyone can see them, and put the child's own version on a card on their desk.

A rule that lives only in memory is not there in the second it is needed, which is the second something more interesting has just walked past. A card…

Some children need to move, and the choice is whether that movement is allowed for or whether it arrives as a disruption later on.

A ball chair, a standing desk, a seat near the front, or permission to walk to the back and return with a nod and nothing said: any of these let the…