Ming from Agents of Speech shares strategies for helping delayed children focus during home learning. Use physical signals and rewards to mark task starts and ends, show rather than tell by modeling and hand-over-hand guidance, and avoid repeating instructions so they don't become background noise.
A lot of times we teach parents to high five with the child in order for the child to know, oh, this is the end of this trial, end of this task. And praising also would be paired with that high five. But at the end of the day, you need a reward in order to let the child understand that there's a beginning and an end to a task. And they're supposed to do. When you're explaining the task, show, don't tell. A lot of parents are remote controlling the child with words. Show them how it is, take their hand, help them pick up the card and give it to you instead of saying the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result. If you do that over and over again, your efficiency with teaching your kid goes way lower because the kid thinks, oh, whatever you say doesn't even matter to me. Second point, child forgets about what they're supposed to do, and then they start losing focus. A lot of parents will say, ah, my kids don't want to listen. I'm like, first of all, it's because you haven't been prompting or explaining the task properly. They forgot what they were supposed to do because you repeated the instruction over and over again. That instruction just becomes background noise.
