I have a wonderful daydreaming 7 year old. Any tips from other parents how I can teach her to "focus" and restrain the daydreaming in certain circumstances (like the classroom).
If she is interested in something (lego friends) her focus is fine. If she is not (school) she checks out big time. She gets this from me Any parents been through this? Are there exercises I could do with her?
Thanks for your time.
IM
For the average 7 year old that will be things like Lego, Playmobil, lighting fires in the forest, playing out, climbing trees, owning a pocket knife and using it to trim sticks into pirate swords, kicking a football in the park, jumping on trampolines.
Is she reading yet? Fill the house with books and comics. Buy a subscription to The Beano. Limit access to things like computers, computer games, TV.
Does she like dancing? Is there a dancing club in your area? Hip-hop, tap - whatever?
If the daydreaming is happening at school, perhaps she finds the lesson boring. Does the teacher have any theories as to why that might be? Is there a particular lesson she does not like?
HTH.
Nick
The school has a "Lernclub" which is a weekly class comprising the talented children from first year to the top class - they do all kinds of fun science experiments. He takes part in that which helps keep his interest.
Maybe your daughter's school has similar?
Cheers,
Nick
Ill bring her for eyes and ears check up. Hadnt thought of that.
The swiss school wants her to see a psychologist about the daydreaming. She is a chronic dreamer in school, in all classes. For example, in a test, when the teacher hoovers near her she does fine (scores like 58/60), when the teacher moves away she doesnt even complete it.
She loves playing outside with the neighbourhood kids and I can see when they are doing something like building a treehouse she can be v focused. She loves lego friends and could build that for hours and re books she can read in both english and german and will sit and listen to me read to her as well. She loves calvin and hobbes and will sit still and read those.
I think she is just a daydreamer. I was too. I feel that she has spent 2 years in kindski hanging out in the forest with little need to actively focus for long periods of time and now slowly needs to learn what it is to focus.
The teacher feels that is related to her movement and that she is underdeveloped from a spacial movement perspective. The teacher asked me if she crawled on time for example (which she did). I agree with the teacher that she is dreamer, I disagree that its related to sporting ability. She skiis, hikes, dancing, swimming, bikes and she likes them. Ill go along with the teachers recommendation to bring her to this psychologist (albeit Ill closely monitor it) but I wanted to do something smaller and simpler too.
Simply put - to teach her the importance of tuning in.
She does ballet and day dreams in that. I was going to start by telling her if she listens in ballet and watches the teacher and tries to follow Ill up her pocket money by 1chf (she has been complaining that her class mates get more pocket money). I wait for her at hte class so it will be easy for me to see if she tries this or not.
It just seems v extreme for me to send her to a psychologist when practical steps (from my perspective) may not have been tried.
I also believe the ability to day dream is great and helps with the ability to cope with pressure as an adult (I still actively daydream) she just needs to learn how to turn it on and off. I need to learn how to teach that.......
Day-dreaming in class can be anything from your child not being stretched enough to being on the minor end of the autism spectrum.
It's not that extreme to send her to a psychologist here. I wouldn't worry too much.
is daydreaming bad?
Maybe you should attend a lecture once as observer and check it out. Maybe the problem is with the teacher?
ask the teacher what they do to make learning fun, to stimulate creativity or to engage students.
How old are the teachers? Thinking back of my childhood only 1 out of 10 of my teachers were engaging.
We have talked to his pediatrician he said nothing is wrong with the kid and finds aggressive behaviour normal for this age, but we insisted for a assessment , then referred to kinderspital. Hope that would help us... and wish you all the best and for your wonderful daughter.(I too feel day dreaming so comforting)
When we moved here the school psychologist recommended ergo therapy to help with his concentration issues and the advanced maths and science classes to stimulate him a bit more as she thought he was getting bored in class.
It may be worth talking to the school psychologist or your paediatrician as the therapies are often covered by health insurance and can be very useful.
They all helped to some extent and whilst at 16 he still has concentration issues he is much better now and doing well in lycée ( gymnasium).
Finding an activity that she really likes and enjoys doing. When our son was about 6 he decided he wanted to play football as that's what all his friends were doing so he joined the football club. We quickly discovered that football wasn't really his thing as during one if the first matches he played in he decided that playing in the long jump sand pit was more interesting than playing in the match.
He dropped football and started swimming and that was something that he really engaged in and did very well in.
I think it's a bit of a familial trait with our family as I used to be nicknamed 'Dolly daydream' at school and one of my aunts was exactly the same.
I have recently bought her a book for school kids aged 9-11 which she loves doing and excels at.....even though it is in French which is her third language. I am also at my wits end as the school are determined to class her as autistic which I do not believe she is. Our family doctor has given a report that she is just very bright and the school are not happy about it but have backed off a little. Maybe you could get the same kind of report from your family doctor?
His school principal says that he may or may not have ADD, but at the very least that he is at the edge of the normal spectrum. They can deal with it at school as they have the resources, but we have to follow things very closely. You send him to brush his teeth and he washes his hands, he forgets at least one thing at school every day, he can add 43+34 in his head but will miss on 2+2... He can easily take 30 minutes to walk the 500 m to his school.
It drives me nuts, and I worry about what will happen when (if) I find a job; who's going to be behind his every steps if I'm not there??? He's actually smart and probably very smart, but he sure acts like he's not on many occasions.
He's rather quiet and has a very vivid imagination, he can sit for long periods looking at books and thinking about god know what. When he plays he's fully focused, once in a while doing homework or playing piano as well. But finding the flow is a real struggle, and getting his attention if he's thinking about something else is almost impossible.
My daughter (currently studying for her degree) was/is a chronic day dreamer. She's also quite talented at art and has won prizes in creative writing competitions.
Same here. My youngest was diagnosed with all kinds of stuff in regards to attention CAPD, ADS minus....as well as some mild form of Cerebral Palsy.
The therapies she got, were all in regards to her CP, none was in regards for her attention deficit.
Yep, at kindergarten/school they said she didn't pay attention, preferred to dawdle on her notebooks, look out the window, living in her own world .....whatever.
Despite it all, she did a brilliant career at school, averaged always over 5.0, has started a year ago her vocational training as a baker-confectioner, is now supported by all her vocational school teachers to start the courses etc for 'Berufsmatur'.
I am firmly convinced that more often than not, those so called daydreamers are more attentive than we think and soak up more than we imagine.
Daydreaming isn't essentially something bad, IMHO I think it is even better than the children, who get chased from pillar to post with all those extra school activities and never have time sort of to take a break from every day life and lose oneself completely in something (die Seele baumeln lassen).
I also find, that the daydreamers are often more thorough , because they often go to the root of something, thinking more about the simplest things, as well as stimulate themselves, not like those kids who want a constant firework in their life, if they don't get that extern stimulus constantly, they get bored and become really naughty .
However, like Trollemors little troll, my daughter also managed to lose herself on the way to and fro Kindergarten/school, very scary for a mum indeed when your 5,6,7yr old child is 45 minutes overdue at home!
For us, a kind of the carrot and stick treatment worked best.
The school and I worked closely together with a little notebook where we wrote daily what happened at home/at school and we had a kind of star chart for her, tied to it were things she really really really loved doing a lot and out of consequence for the plan only was allowed to do/enjoy when she acquired the pre-set amount of stars.
Overall it took a little more than a year and from the end of 2nd grade onwards , the daydreaming got lesser and the attention & focus better.
However to check the hearing and eye sight of kids regularly is important.
I was classified as a daydreamer......in my case it turned out later in life, I was almost certainly already hard of hearing around 5-6 yrs old which went undetected until I was 16.
In hindsight I wish my parents/teachers would've realised that I was never lazy or stupid and would've sent me for tests.
So best way i think is to use all what is on offer , check the physical side of things, hearing/seeing/ motor development as well as, why not have a psychologist or other specialist do some tests about the development of the child.
NOWHERE is stated one is a failure as a parent when a child may need some kind or other of therapy...and nowhere is written to send ones child to a therapy is mandatory.
My aforementioned youngest daughter was designated to go to a special needs school by the doctors who treated her and her quite unhelpful kindergarten teacher.
I refused that point blank , I was convinced my child will succeed in regular school as well with my help and support....and she did!!
Irish Marmot, believe in your gut feeling in regards to your child...but make use of what is on offer to you, best of both ways really.
You'd think medication would "fix" everything but it doesn't - all the negative experiences, the sense of being stupid and incompetent, the low self-esteem because you just can't live up to what is expected, that does not go away. Neither do the dysfunctional behaviour patterns, I've been trying to re-wire my brain for years now as well as well as constantly second-guess my actions and thoughts for "acceptability" and it's exhausting.
Had I known sooner, my life would have been very different. It may not be ADD with your daughter, of course, but it is so often overlooked in girls because they are not disruptive. Better to find out early on, nowadays they don't just give you stimulants and tell you to get on with it, there are more options, like neurofeedback and targeted behavioural training.
I taught several daydreamers. The technique I found worked best (apart from standing behind them and nagging them to stay on task) was to use a sand timer. In the UK you can order large sand timers which last for various durations. I would imagine a school here would be able to get hold of similar items. I had a set of sand timers in the classroom (they went from 1 minute to 10 minutes), and I would give the child a sand timer and say "I expect you to do x before this timer runs out," or alternatively "You have three turns of the sand timer to complete this task."
I could then spend my time helping all the children in the class (including the daydreamer of course), and all I had to do was to keep an eye on the timer.
I found that this really helped the child stay on track, because there was a visual reminded of how much time they had left, and a very clear expectation of how long a task should take. For children around your daughter's age, their grasp of time is still developing, so a sand timer helps more than, say, giving them ten minutes by the clock.
The other good thing about this method is that you can use it to develop the child's concentration. So at first you give them tasks which they should easily do in the time, even if they daydream - and then lots of praise when they complete it. Then over time you can gradually increase the expectation of what they should do in the given time. Also, if you start out with, for example, a five minute timer, the child gets used to working independently without reminders for five minutes. Then you give them an 8 minute timer, and the child goes for that little bit longer without being reminded to concentrate... and so on. So you work on both their productivity and their attention span. It's also good if you can record what the child did in the set time - so that occasionally you can look back and say 'Wow! Two weeks ago you did 4 sums in 5 minutes... this week you managed to do 8 sums in 5 minutes!'
Hopefully the teacher might be willing to implement this in school, but this is also something you could also use at home. Ideally you could use it in both environments.
(I do realise with modern technology a sand timer seems very old-fashioned, but there is a strongly visual element to a sand timer which I think helps children more than a countdown on a mobile phone).