Monthly Archives: April 2016

Holistic Support for Children With ADD/ADHD

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So our last post was more suggestions from published studies,  ADD/ADHD educational literature and the US Department of Education regarding general support for educational success.  Today we are going to focus on some of the more holistic options and ideas for general support for the child with ADD/ADHD that I have cross-referenced with just a few studies as I could find them.

The list of complementary therapies parents have used to support ADD/ADHD is long and cannot be adequately listed in one post:  elimination diets, avoiding food allergens and food colorings/preservatives, Omega 3 and other supplements, chiropractic work, craniosacral work, Traditional Chinese Medicine, EEG biofeedback therapy, Occupational Therapy , Physical Therapy, massage, yoga, homeopathy, work with naturopathic doctors.  Other things from a Waldorf perspective may include light or color therapy, sound therapy, anthroposophic medicine, therapeutic eurythmy.

Regular lifestyle choices that many parents who read this blog are familiar with but also supportive to children with ADD/ADHD include regular rhythm, simplification in the environment and outside of the home activities, a great diet of outdoor time and sensory play in the outdoors, warm and natural materials for warmth and play, not burdening smaller children with too many choices.  I am sure there are many other options that exist that I have left out.  Please be sure to leave a comment and let me know what you have used in your family if I have.

In just digging around, here is just a tiny sampling of the links to research I have found that you as a parent could share with your health care or educational team for your child or delve into for yourself.  Parents can sometimes end up spending lots of money on therapies for their child; I think that not everything wonderful has studies behind it, but on the other hand it is  nice to see some do and maybe that is a place to start if you have limited funds and want to look into supportive therapies.

Is there a link between ADD/ADHD and Celiac Disease?

Omega-3 and Zinc Supplementation; the role of zinc 

Case study of chiropractic care and another case study here.  A 2010 systematic review.

EEG Biofeedback (there are many studies out there; this is well-researched.) Here is an example of one study; some studies include only children or teens on Ritalin, so look through and see the study criteria when you look at a study.

Traditional Chinese Medicine efficacy versus Ritalin; meta analysis of acupuncture and its affect on AD/HD

The relationship between Obstructive Sleep Apnea and  AD/HD; outcomes after surgery

Yoga and ADD/ADHD

This is just a tiny, tiny tip of the research out there. I urge you to go onto PubMed’s website and search for yourself under these topics to see what is out there.  Please share with me what complementary choices or lifestyle choices your family has made that you felt had the greatest impact and success for your child with ADD/ADHD.

Blessings,
Carrie

Teaching Children With ADD/ADHD

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(The suggestions in this post are more being pulled from research and mainstream literature and really geared more toward a traditional, not homeschooling, environment – although some of these ideas could work quite well there.  They do not represent my independent total ideas of general suggestions, which would include more holistic options as well. However, I feel it is extremely important that parents know what mainstream health care professionals are saying, what research is saying, because if a child is in a traditional school setting particularly I think parents need to have familiarity with what is out there from this perspective.  There are more posts to come in this series in which I hope to detail some other suggestions for teaching)

In our last post, we looked at the neurobiologic differences of children who have ADD/ADHD compared to children who don’t.  However, this often leads to the inevitable question of how to best help children who are experiencing these challenges.  The work of the family due to children who have ADD/ADHD and its often related co-morbidities are real.    And, although not all readers who read this blog homeschool, I think it can feel very difficult in the beginning for the homeschooling parent who is teaching a child with ADD/ADHD where it feels like finding all the answers are on their shoulders.

Here are a few things I would think about regarding teaching and support in general.  Some of these are ideas borne out in studies, some are ideas that parents of children with ADD/ADHD have told me were helpful over the years, and some of my own ideas based on the children I have worked with when I was an actively practicing pediatric physical therapist.

Some very general things:

Exercise – Exercise improves learning in general for all children, and especially  for children with attentional deficits, exercise helps increase neurotransmitter activity.  Here is an example of one study regarding exercise and boys with ADD/ADHD.  Here is one meta-analysis  on this subject from February of 2016.  There is some evidence that exercise in nature is particularly wonderful.

Positive strengths – making a list of your child or student’s positive traits is so important.  It can carry a parent through hard times, it can help to have something to say when a child with ADD/ADHD suffers with low self-esteem or feels rejected socially, and it gives a teacher a place to draw from in teaching.

According to this document regarding teaching children with ADD/ADHD from the U.S. Department of Education, it is important to assess exactly how, when, and why the child becomes inattentive or disruptive.  Then the teacher can make up a strategy based upon academic teaching, behavior management, and accommodations.

Some general strategies could include:

Older children and teens in the classroom or a noisy environment can use noise cancelling headphones for working or use white noise.  Here is a study from March of 2016 talking about this issue.

Movement can be incorporated by teachers.  Teachers in schools and in homeschools can design their teaching  to have “Brain Breaks” and get up and move every 20 minutes or so.  Brain breaks in the classroom can include any number of activities, but true physical therapy may be needed to deal with increased motor issues, as many children with ADD/ADHD do have motor challenges.

This recent meta-analysis shows that to decrease disruptive behavior during school, consequences and self-regulation techniques provide the best effects (but what “consequences” were used or what self-regulation techniques were used were not specifically explored).

“High Interest” teaching strategies are important – because children and teens with ADD/ADHD have reduced dopamine receptions and transporters in the area of the brain that is involved with reward and motivation, high interest subjects help improve academic performance.  Students with ADD/ADHD often do not learn well with just visual or auditory input – they often need a more hands-on style with visual cueing.

Understand that learning is DEVELOPMENTAL.  If a child or teenager with ADD/ADHD has delayed neurobiologic brain maturation, he or she will not have the learning or memory capacity of students of the same age.  (This is where structural maturation CAN impact function).   Working memory for student with ADD/ADHD, even a teenager, may be limited to about five items or fewer.  So, a lesson in which the student is supposed to remember ten things will not be learned in one lesson.

For children with ADD/ADHD, if you are the teacher, you must be very clear as to your objectives in learning.  This seems to really help children with ADD/ADHD.

As a teacher, you can orally ask questions as you go along and point to visual cues to help assist in answering.  In public schools, some of the methods being used include the teacher giving the student a copy of lecture notes to the student in outline form with key points marked to help the student, or to provide skeletal outlines to provide compensation for poor working memory.  Reducing notetaking for teens is important.

Showing sample completed projects or pages helps.  Reduced written work should be expected.  Having an older child or teen  write the correct answer only or fill in blank often works better than having a child try to write full essays or summaries.

Quality over quantity.  Pick your assignments for your child carefully.

These are general suggestions.  I hope to address helping with language arts and math in future posts to help parents and homeschooling parents.

Blessings,

Carrie

 

Neurobiologic Differences in Children With AD/HD

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ADD/ADHD occurs in approximately 11 percent of all children, according to the CDC.  If  you are someone who is blessed to have a child or teenager who has challenges with attention and executive function, there are few things you might want to keep in mind.  Children with ADD/ADHD are NOT alike, and ADD/ADHD is considered, at this point, a complex neurobiological disorder by the medical community .  We say this because of these main medical findings:

Children with ADD/ADHD seem to have reduced cerebral blood flow to some parts in the front of the brain.  These areas typically control attention, impulsivity, sensitivity to rewards and punishments, emotions, and memory.

There is underactivity of specific neurotransmitters in the brain, specifically dopamine and norephinephrine.    This has been shown on PET scans.  There have been several genes linked to ADD/ADHD – two were dopamine receptor genes, along with a dopamine transporter gene.  Remember, dopamine plays a major role in regulating attention, concentration, movement, behavior, response to punishment and reward, learning, working memory, analysis of a task, problem solving, and long-term memory.

Some sections of the brain are smaller in children and teenagers with ADD/ADHD.  This review looks at the specific areas of the brain with volume reduction.

There is a lag in structural brain maturation of children with ADD/ADHD.  ADHD children may more match children 1-3 years younger, with the largest lags in structural maturation seen in older children in one study.

So, if you are parenting or teaching children who have attentional and executive function challenges, understanding these neurobiologic differences many assist you in developing a more cohesive strategy for helping your child.

The other thing to remember is that ADD/ADHD often occurs with other things,  including learning disabilities, Tourette’s Syndrome, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, substance abuse, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and executive functioning difficulties.  Sleep disturbances are also extremely common, along with challenges in transitions and changes in routine.  There are often multiple challenges to be addressed together in order to lead to success for the child or teen in school and in life.

Many blessings,
Carrie

Weeks 29 and 30: Homeschooling Eighth, Fifth, and Kindy

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We took a lovely week to be at the sea and had a little holiday.  I spent a little time thinking about our rhythm, which has withstood quite a number of disruptions this year.  We need a strong ending to the school year, so I think I pretty much came upon refining our rhythm to be: me working out early/breakfast; going over our Anglican Spiritual Studies; time for our kindergartener; recess; Main Lesson for our fifth grader; Main lesson for our eighth grader and then a late lunch and more recess.  Several days a week we may have to come back to finish up main lesson kinds of projects and such.  So, it feels comfortable and do-able for the rest of the school year to me at this point and I am hoping to have a great ending to the school year.

Kindergarten:  We have had a grand time with our Spring Circle.  Our story has been Suzanne Down’s “Spring Kite Music” from her book, “Spring Tales”.  Our general rhythm has been baking on Mondays, crafting on Wednesdays, and painting on Fridays with Tuesdays and Thursdays being our days out at Forest Kindergarten.  We have also been making and playing little homemade games – things such as a variation of a homemade Candyland – and other games.  We have been singing and doing a lot of little finger plays for Spring as well.  Such a sweet time.

Fifth Grade – Our fifth grader is finishing up a block that combined Canadian Geography with the Metric System.  Our main project for Canada has been a giant salt dough map where we have been painting provinces, rivers, and marking towns.  We have been using the metric system to go over the height of landmarks, distances between towns, what we would eat in our meals in Canada in grams and liters.  We have been reviewing and practicing a lot with the four math processes, and fractions.  We finished reading the book “Seabird” by Holling C. Holling and have now moved into reading about Hawaii in preparation for our North American Geography block.  We are also working diligently on spelling as well.

Eighth Grade – We finished tracing the events of the Cold War through four decades, mainly through the biographies of Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon, and Reagan.  This included the arms race and the Space Race, the benefits of space exploration and where space exploration is today (and a lovely tie in was seeing the rocket launch on the Florida coast whilst on vacation), the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the differences between a president such as Nixon and detente and Reagan’s policies.  Then we moved into the War on Terror and all the different groups and players involved from the Persian Gulf War right up to today.  Our last foray this week is into the Age of Digitality – the history of the Internet and the World Wide Web and challenges of this century.  Our Main Lesson book pages have included amazing writing and art work for this block.  We are looking forward to starting Oceanography tomorrow.  We are starting the first few days by tying in to some of the peoples who traveled the oceans in different watercrafts, and then a little about plate tectonics and a beautiful look at the all the wonders of the ocean floor.  I am very excited about this block!

In World Geography, we finished up Africa and also Russia.  We have reviewed all the geography of Russia, the different ethnic groups within Russia, Russia’s history, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The only place we have left to study is Europe, so it feels good we are coming to the end of our year-long geography course.

I am ready to keep forging ahead with our homeschooling year, and also looking forward to get back on planning for first, sixth, and ninth grade. I have actually felt more stumped by first grade lately in planning, but recently came up with some creative ideas that I think will lead to a fun first grade for our littlest.

I would love to hear what you are working on!

Blessings,

Carrie

Finding Peace: Connection of the Heart

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Connection is the heart of what it means to be human.  Connection is what enables us to know ourselves deeply and to live into our own needs and values. There can also be connection to a significant other ; connection to our children; connection to other family and friends in community; connection to nature and connection to the Creator and Creation.

So often this is the first thing that seems to get lost in the mad shuffle.  It can be easy to disconnect from ourselves – people do it all the time with drugs and alcohol, screens, food, and sexual and other addictions.  It can be easy to disconnect from our children as well.  Some level of benign neglect is healthy, I think, but there also has to be where a child feels heard and understood and part of the family and that the child feels secure and stable so they can grow forth on their own journey from this stability. And stability comes from parents who address and heal their own wounds as well.

Sometimes people have asked me how to begin with these matters of the heart.  They will ask what to do with Waldorf Education for their children because they don’t believe in God.  I ask them what do they believe in, and how can they go from there?  What do they truly know?  One of the biggest tenets I think is that we cannot show our children that the world is a good place and that people are good if we ourselves do not believe that.  There is a time and a place to understand the reality (and sometimes horrors of the world), but small children desperately need to know stability, love, connection, and goodness.  They need to see the goodness of the world, however we find it, through our eyes.

And often, when we are in despair and in our darkest moments, we need to know about that goodness as well.  That longing for goodness never disappears completely.  Start small so we can bring that to the next generation for our world.

Many blessings,
Carrie

Spiritual Studies in the Episcopal/Anglican Homeschool

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We were on vacation last week, enjoying some sun and sand.  After a rather rough time with the loss of people this fall and a beloved pet especially this spring, it was good to get away for a little bit.  The wonderful thing about vacations is that hopefully one finds time to think (although my joke is always that taking a trip with children is really a holiday, not a vacation! LOL).

At any rate, I was feeling a little consumed by some little words from the Book of Common Prayer found in the Baptismal Rite…In the baptism of a new member, the entire Body of Christ in the parish re-affirms his or her own baptismal vows –  to continue in the tradition of the apostles in fellowship, teaching and communion; to resist evil; to be a good example of Christ’s love in the world, to love and serve all people, to strive for justice and dignity and peace among all people, to respect the dignity of all every human being.  After baptism and chrismation, part of the prayer said by the priest is:

Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Sprit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all Your works.

Those words always strike me as such a dovetail to what I want for my children to receive from our parenting and from our homeschooling.  And this brings me to Anglican Spiritual traditions within homeschooling.  This is actually not an easy subject.  In the Christian homeschooling market, there are many resources for all denominations of Christianity.  Yet, I think perhaps because there is such a strong and large tradition of Anglican and Episcopalian school choices, that at least here in the United States, I cannot find any single resource at all specifically directed to families of the Anglican Communion who are homeschooling.  The few resources I have found and adapted I have commented upon in blog posts in the past.

We learn about the church in community by attending Liturgy and also through activities within our church body. We break bread together on our knees in community, our baptisms are in community, we love in community.  Our children are involved heavily in choir and the Royal School of Church Music program.  Yet, in our home time where we are together as a family and a small home church so to speak , I have to be conscious and mindful.  My goals for right now when we start our school day include:

To open with prayer- which by its very nature, brings in The Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican view of time, the Saints we hold in communion, and the 5 Marks of Mission of the Episcopal Church (for example, this week we celebrate St. Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury and Martyr, 1012; we celebrate St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1109; and St George, the Patron Saint of England; but we also celebrate John Muir, whose life story fits into one of our mission marks:  “To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew life on earth”).  During this time, we explore also different paths of mysticism within the Anglican tradition and within the Body of Christ, and icons.

To read the Bible together and discuss intimately.  Some of the books from Cowley Publications, which is a ministry of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, a religious community for men in the Episcopal Church, have been helpful, along with books by author Vicki Black.

Lastly, we will spend a few moments each day discussing any of the following:   the Episcopal Church’s tenets, tenets of good Christian living, famous Episcopalians and Anglicans through biographical format, the Visual and Musical Arts of the Church, the three Creeds we follow, and the history of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church in America  and the Anglican Communion as a whole.

Many blessings and light,

Carrie

 

These Are A Few of My Favorite Things: April

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April can be such a lovely month in the Deep South.  We have tulips blooming, everything is turning green, and the weather, whilst at times unpredictable, is generally heading toward warm.  It is also a lovely time to explore the mountains and the seaside and to revel in all of nature awakening.

This month, we are celebrating Eastertide in its fullest glory.  The calendar of the Anglican Communion and The Episcopal Church include an amazing array of Saints this month; so many wonderful people.   Our main festival dates in our family this month include:

23- St. George

25- St. Mark

29- St. Catherine of Siena

and I am looking ahead to Ascension Day (Thursday, May 5th) and the Rogation Days that precede Ascension Day ( the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday prior to Ascension Day).  There is also a Novena of 9 days that begins on Ascension Day and ends on the Eve of Pentecost.  So I am really thinking about how to mark that.

These are a few of my favorite things this month for my family:

  • Since we are still in Eastertide here,  dyeing of eggs,  thinking of the Paschal candle and light in our home, indoor dish Easter gardens, Easter carols (yes, they are real!) and attending church are in my heart
  • Gardens outside as well – especially leading up to Rogation Days which is a wonderful time to have seeds, gardening tools and homesteads blessed.
  • Spring cleaning, decluttering, and moving ahead with some simple decorating I have wanted to do in our home.

These are a few of my favorite things for small children:

  • Ramping up all kinds of physical activity since the weather is generally nice…hiking, kayaking, roller blading, walking, playing in the yard never disappeared these past months, but I feel so drawn to these activities now.
  • Incorporating more and more loose parts play and re-arranging indoor and outdoor play areas.

P.S. — For those of you who are using any form of screens with your small children, how about looking at rhythm, play and outside time in preparation for Screen Free Week?  Screen Free Week 2016 is coming May 2-8! You can see http://www.screenfree.org for more details. 🙂

These are a few of my favorite things for grades-age children:

  • Spring handwork – wet felting, making beautiful spring crafts
  • Movement outside and exploring nature
  • Adjusting our rhythm to the seasons, but sticking to strong awake, rest and bedtimes, along with regular nourishing whole foods mealtimes.

These are a few of my favorite things for teens:

  • Exploring local history through geological and nature study, and also through local historical events of significance.  There are so many National Park sites and museums to explore!
  • Letting teens sleep.  Spring is a time when a lot of physical growth occurs, and teens need their sleep!

These are a few of my favorite things for my own inner work:

  • I am in the midst of creating a Sacred Hour – half to be spent in personal study, and half to be spent with our children in sharing the Saints, the Bible and Anglican traditions.  I am feeling very happy about this.
  •  I have been looking closely at boundaries on my own time and what truly makes me feel comfortable and happy in the way I use time

These are a few of my favorite things for my own self-care and health:

  • Continuing to get up and work out before my day starts with the family.
  • Drinking water.

These are a few of my favorite things for homeschooling:

  • Well, I had started planning and got most of sixth grade planned and two blocks of ninth grade (first year of high school), and then stopped..so I need to get back to planning again.

Please share with me what is inspiring you this month!

Blessings,
Carrie