The Secret to Helping ANY Child Follow Your Directions

parents there is an art form to helping children follow directions and pay attention this is a science that has nothing to do with race with gender with age with your actual kids it's something that anybody can learn and anybody can put into practice to immediately correct and improve your child's behavior and in this video I'm going to show you just that exactly what you can do to help your child focus even if you don't think they can okay because I used to think the same thing my first year teaching I had 25 kids they were

bouncing off the walls and I go home every day like what's wrong with my kids one day I dropped them off at PE and I watched them with the PE teacher Miss Williams and I see the same kids following all of her directions and I'm like okay maybe it's the fact that they're just doing something active maybe that's what they like until one day Miss Williams came in my classroom and taught a math lesson with my kids and they had the same behavior it wasn't Miss Williams it wasn't PE it's the fact that she knew

the exact secrets I'm about to show you and so I watched her and I copied her every single day until I knew exactly how to help any child behave okay and over the course of my teaching career I ended up taking all of the most challenging kids in the grade level in my class every year halfway through the year they get switched to my classroom anyways to the point where I just started asking for them beginning of the RK what are the 10 hardest kids in kindergarten I'll take them what are the 10 hardest kids

in first grade I'll take them because I know how to help them Focus okay and I'm gonna show you just that so unlike a classroom here's your advantage okay this is what you've got going for you you don't need to teach 25 kids at once you can just focus on one and this is an important point for people with two kids teach two if you must teach one if you can these two children they have different things they need to focus on maybe this one needs this sound and this one needs this sound the first

thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say bye bye to this one I'm gonna have them do something else during this time and I'm gonna focus on just one child at a time okay and here's what I'm gonna do first a lot of us are teaching side by side we're keeping a little bit of a distance and we're trying to teach our kids like that that's usually not going to work what we want to do is we want to teach face to face with our child so I want our child to be literally facing us

and looking at our body and looking at our mouth next we make sure that we are close so I can be face to face all the way over there or I can be really really close and this is something I learned from Miss Williams there is no such thing as being too close when we get in a child's space it's not intrusive it just helps them to stay in the moment if our energy is right that is going to calm them down and help them Focus so we sit face to face we get really close

and the next thing we do is we establish eye contact you don't want a second to go by we are looking to the side looking around not focused playing with your stuff at the very beginning of the lesson your eyes do not move off of their their eyes it is just like this just like that we also establish physical contact so my left hand right now I'm holding the little bears back so it doesn't fall down but I might model it with my right hand where I'm touching the shoulder I'm touching the face I'm touching

the knee I'm touching the elbow there's some sort of physical contact this can even be high fives if you're more comfortable with it but there's something about proximity eye contact and a physical contact that puts our kid in a position to focus okay and no one is talking about this everyone's talking about Behavior like it's like some conversation we have before the learning time there's a physical aspect to how we sit and how we interact with the kid they can feel our energy okay which brings me to the next Point our energy as we're here

I'm a little bit hyped for the video so you can hear me because I love talking about this but our energy is calm and confident watch this okay today we're going to focus on three sounds you can see I'm not doing singing song stuff I'm not like um okay do you want to do none of that calm confident okay so physical contact proximity face to face eye contact we have a calm and a confident energy that's going to be the hardest part for most of you because those little thoughts you have in your head that

doubt of like can I do this can I not do this are they going to listen to me your kid can feel it I promise you I just came back from four home visits where kids did not want to do the work and for each of those visits I explained this conversation about energy to the parent and they didn't quite get it but when I showed it to them they understood the kid can feel your nervous energy so you've got to get rid of it fake it till you make it if you need to calm

confident energy okay we've got them here we're calm we're confident we're face to face we're making eye contact we're touching their elbow we're giving them high fives the next thing we need to do is be very clear about what's going to happen don't leave anything up for guessing Okay you might say something like this okay today we're going to focus on three letter sounds and once we finish practicing those three letter sounds we're gonna take a break and we're gonna go dance they know exactly what's coming with blending words I might be even more specific

and I might say this okay sweetheart we're gonna practice blending 10 words I'm gonna show you those 10 and I'm going to erase every single time once all 10 of those words are gone we're gonna go to a dance party right and I'm giving them something to look forward to they know this is what we're gonna do and they know this is what we're gonna get I can't stress how important that is okay now the trickiest thing for some folks even if you're calm even if you're confident is what I call questions statements and directions

okay so I'm going to put the bear here for just a second so I can explain this to you because this is something that a lot of folks get wrong and if you record yourself doing a lesson you'll see just how many times you mess this up without ever realizing this okay and it goes like this there's three things we can give a child during learning time we can ask them a question like do you want to do the learning time we can tell them a statement like it is learning time or we can give

them a direction that says okay tell me the first sound with questions we leave it open for whatever our kid wants to say when we ask a question where we're telling our kid is the answer is not important you get to choose if I've got my bear okay and I start my lesson I say okay do you want to do your sounds today guess what bear now gets to choose and bear can say no and if bear says no I have to respect that because I gave bear the choice okay we don't ask questions about

things that matter we don't we give directions now for some of us we think we're giving directions when in reality we're giving statements we're saying okay it's learning time and our kid is running away we're saying okay I've got the sounds out let's go the kid is jumping around it's not going to work okay statements are just that it is literally something we're saying it is not a Direction so if we've got kid here watch the posture okay just like this we're ready to go we're going to give them a very clear Direction not a

question not a statement we're going to tell them what's going to happen okay so we heard we're going to practice 10 words when I show the word you're going to blend it back to me and then after those 10 words we're gonna go play that is a crystal clear Direction and if you set up your camera and you count literally do tally marks how many times you ask questions how many times you make statements how many times you give directions you'll see that you are probably asking the wrong questions and failing to give clear directions

now does that mean you shouldn't ask any questions at all no you should ask a ton of questions okay I sprinkle the learning environment with questions all over the difference is the questions don't matter it makes bear feel like bear is getting to choose the learning it makes bear feel like they're getting a choice when in reality I'm just setting bear up to be happy to be successful and then I'm giving a direction I might say okay do you want to start with the sound what do you want to start with this sound I don't

care which one bear chooses bear might care I don't care right I might say okay do you want to start with the red marker or do you want to start with the green marker the green marker okay do you want to take the top off or do you want me to take it off you want to take the top off here you go you can take the top off the green marker great job there now now which board do you want do you want to erase the word or do you want me lots of questions

right bear is now in control Bear's having fun but what I'm not going to do is say okay do you want to work or do you want to not work because bear is going to say I don't want to work we give questions about stuff that does not matter then we give Clear Directions when it does okay there is an element of this that is our body language there is an element of this that is the questions statements and directions and there is a huge element of this that is our energy our beliefs and our

expectations and you can copy everything I just showed you in this video and you can still fail if you go into this with the attitude that your kid can't do it okay those people you watch online who say kids can't read until this age or that age or whatever else research says this or that it doesn't if you buy into that you are going to fail before you start it would be better for you to do nothing at all because you're going to work with your kid and you're going to get frustrated with them okay

if you come in with the energy that you can't do it that you can't help your child focus if all you see is okay when they go with Mom they focus or when they go with Dad they focus or at school they focus but they can't do it with me you're gonna fail too if you say okay my kid has this learning disability or that learning disability or they have this issue or that issue so they're different you are going to fail you have to believe in your kid and this is why when I call

parents up and I say I'm coming over I'm going to work with your kid and they tell me this that and the other thing my kid can't do it my kids allergic to learning my kid hates this I don't pay any Minds okay that's your belief that's your expectation that's why the kid isn't working for you when I sit down with a child I am putting everything in my control my body language my posture my touch my eye contact my proximity the face-to-face my energy calm and confident my expectations that they can do it the

questions I ask that don't matter and the directions that I give that do I let them know exactly what they're doing now and exactly what's coming next and I don't let them off the hook believe it or not this works for every child and it's going to be a whole lot of fun for them and if you've had learning time that is not fun and you feel like it's been forced once you know what to do with your body with your position with your energy with your language with your eyes all these little details all

of a sudden you're gonna see Learning Time becomes fun for both of you so if you have questions about your little one's Behavior feel free to drop them in the comments I'll be happy to answer but if your energy is like oh I don't think my kid can do it don't even try okay this is not going to be the thing for you otherwise I hope this is sincerely helpful for you working with your little one please let me know how it goes and until next time I will talk to you soon