Summer is here! School is over! It's time to be outside and play. While some children attend camp during the summer, for many of our children the summer months are unstructured time.

Now that they don't have to use their resources to focus on academics let's talk about how to help them learn to structure their free time. Executive functioning skills are not just for business executives. Executive functions are the skills we need to live everyday life. They play a crucial role in self-esteem, impulse control, flexible thinking, managing social situations, breaking down a big task into doable parts and dealing with stress.  

Help them to plan out their daily and weekly activity schedule. Discuss the activity choices and which day is best. How much time do you need for the activity? How long will it take to get there and how much extra will you need if there is traffic? Using a calendar fill in the weekly agenda. You can do this even if your child goes to camp. Discuss what will happen when they come home after camp and what the evening and weekend schedules are.

Many schools give out summer reading lists. This is the perfect opportunity to work on time management skills and breaking down a task into small manageable sections. Discuss how many chapters or pages are in the book. How long can you read before you lose focus and attention? Are you going to read every day? What is the time of day when your concentration is at its optimum? If they need to take notes or answer questions about the book when will they do that? Show them that by breaking the task down into small doable pieces it isn't as overwhelming as they think.

Tips and Tools   

Concept of the Month:  Organizing and Managing Time    Though this seems to be self-explanatory many of our children, regardless of age, have a great deal of difficulty managing their time. They don't know how long it will take to  complete a task or how to break it down into doable steps.  

Children have a strong need to feel competent and self-assured . We need to help them learn how to solve problems on their own rather than doing it for them or getting caught up in a battle of wills. Ask them "What do you think you can do about that?" rather than telling them what they should do.

Activity: Organizing your room

Draw the room on a piece of paper and break it into spaces/sections. Have your child place objects in the appropriate space in the room. The concept here is to learn to organize based on the category. Neatness isn't important yet. Use a box for the 'I don't need this anymore' category.  

Once the objects have been assigned a space you can begin to organize within each space. This doesn't have to be done all at once - in fact it should be done over a period of time. The idea is to learn to manage your time effectively as well as how to prioritize and organize.