Ideas to Help a Distractable Child with Schoolwork

I tear things out of magazines.  Articles, recipes, pictures, whatever catches my eye.

I'm trying to pare down my pile of ripped-out pieces of paper.

Hence, this post. 

Do we think Joel defines the word distractible?  He couldn't even stand still long enough for me to take this picture. 

From the time I said "say cheese" until the shutter engaged, he'd already decided he didn't want to bother remaining stationary.

Distractible

So that I can keep track of these fabulous ideas, I'm putting them here and Pinning them, rather than trying to keep track of one sheet of paper.

These are copied verbatim from an insightful author, Carol Barnier, in an article in Homeschool Magazine; because I can't find the article online anywhere, this is how I'm going to save it.

• Hand out math one problem at a time.  While you're working in the kitchen, take a small  piece of scrap paper and write a single math problem on it.  When he has done it correctly, he wads it up and shoots it into the basketball hoop (made from a hanger that you've hung in the kitchen)
• Go to the park.  Have him climb to the top of the slide, but before he can slide down, he has to spell five words correctly.
• Put the answers to math problems on 3x5 cards and spread them out on the floor. Read a problem to him and let him jump on the answers.  If you're doing multiplication, call out the answer and let him jump on the two cards that multiplied together create the answer.
• Do it on the whiteboard.  For reasons not fully explainable, problems of any sort done on a whiteboard are far less taxing than sitting at a table and working on paper.
• Instead of writing on paper, write spelling words in a tray of wet sand or across a nearly flattened bag filled with a bit of shaving cream.
• If you need for him to sit still and listen, you must give his hands something repetitive and mindless to do.  Taking corn off of a cob, one at a time with tweezers, separating puff balls by size and color using chop sticks, putting a large bowl of pennies into the small slot of a bank one at a time.  Mindless and repetitive. 
• Cake Walk your learning.  Put cards down on the floor in a way that creates a trail that circles back onto itself.  Start playing a fun song on your CD player while your student walks along the trail.  When you hit the pause button, to reveal his task he stops and flips over the card he's stepping on.  Maybe it's a math problem, a vocabulary word, a science question.  If he gets it right, the card is kept facing up.  But if it's incorrect, it goes back into play for review.  Keep playing till all the cards are up.  Remember, this is called "Cake Walk".  There's supposed to be a prize at the end.  Cake works, but so does a stick of gum.
• Toss a beanbag back and forth.  Any information that is linear in nature can be learned this way.  How about books of the Bible.  You say "Genesis" and toss the bag to your child.  She says "Exodus" and tosses it back.  This works for ABCs, skip counting, spelling of individual words, poems, pretty much any information with a beginning and an end.

Oh, I can see Joel enjoying each and every one of these activities.  Time to find some tweezers and chop sticks!