Increasing your child’s attention span will help him become more available for learning.
- Store toys in consistent locations, and prompt your child to help with clean-up.
- Organize toys by category (balls with balls, dolls with dolls, blocks with blocks).
- Minimize distractions and eliminate changes.
- Touch your child’s hand to prompt attention.
- Use pointing to increase your child’s attention.
- Verbally coach your child through tasks.
- Establish and maintain consistent routines.
- Play games, sing sounds, and read books with familiar patterns.
- Model appropriate task completion with a beginning, middle, and end.
- Play hide-and-seek with favorite objects (allow observation of you hiding objects in a few places then do not allow observation of hiding).
- Use “absurdities” (e.g. hold a phone to your ear, but then push it along the floor like a car, make it “fly” like a plane, put it on your foot like a shoe, etc., etc.).
- Increase length of tasks (e.g., “Get your coat”; “get my coat and your coat”).
- Play auditory/visual memory games (e.g., use speech sounds and gestures at your child’s level to play a developmentally appropriate version of “Simon Says”).
