<p>I would like to hear some tips and organizational strategies from older special needs students and their parents which helped them handle daily life in middle school and high school. What did you do to make things simpler and easier for yourself or your child?</p>
<p>For example, adolescence brings the need for more self-care, eg. shaving, managing menstruation, putting on contact lenses, applying makeup, changing in the locker room for gym class and sports, etc. Also, there are more complicated class schedules with different supplies for different teachers in different rooms and all that has to be remembered/managed. Teachers stop spoon-feeding assignments and so there is no back-up instruction sheet if the student didn't catch the project directions the first time. </p>
<p>I feel like my daughter is a poser. She's not at all normal in her coping ability, but has to come off as if she were just like everyone else, since she's in regular and even some advanced classes and participates in a number of activities.</p>
<p>If your child has ADD, here are some things I have learned (from hard experience!) that work well for my high school age son:
First and most important is to get him “on board” with the idea that he is responsible for dealing with his ADD … not alone, of course, but he has to be involved. I have found it useful to refer to his ADD as an outside force that tries to “trick” him – for example, if he has a test coming up I might say, “You know, your ADD might try to trick you into thinking that you don’t need to study. What can you do to avoid that happening?”
Another important element is having a regular routine. We came up with a “daily routine” checklist that he fills out after coming home from school. The first step on his checklist is organizing the loose papers that have accumulated in his backpack during the day, and either gluing/stapling them into his notebooks or into folders; then he makes a list of all the homework/review that he needs to do; then he assembles the necessary books and supplies to do the work. that he needs to do. As he completes each task, he writes down how much time he has spent on it. We keep all the completed checklists in a looseleaf binder … that way, if his grades start slipping in a particular subject we can go back and see whether he has been spending enough time on it. We also have a weekly schedule in the binder, showing the times that he is expected to be doing homework and other times when he is free to relax and go out. All this paperwork might sound like a lot of extra work, but in fact it has helped a lot with self-monitoring his ADD.
Inevitably there will be slipups … a missed assignment, a flubbed test, etc. When this happens, I make a supreme effort not to be angry or critical. Once again referring to ADD as our common enemy, I’ll say something like, “Well, looks like your ADD got the better of you this time … let’s see if we can figure out what happened so we can beat it next time.”</p>