I was asked to suggest some sites that I think have decent suggestions for classroom adaptations for Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder. I thought it might be helpful to other readers if I posted them here. With all these it’s important to select ideas that are appropriate for your child’s age, developmental level, and characteristics. Remember, you’re the world expert on your kid! If you want to offer suggestions to teachers, it would be helpful to cut and paste accommodations that seem on target, then offer a one-page collection to teachers for their consideration.

Before you check these out, you may want to scroll down through recent posts in the RiverTown News, several of which touch on ADHD or executive function.

The ADHD Information Library is a new Google discovery for me, but their Classroom Tips for Teachers of ADD ADHD Students looks well thought out, with abundant detail and rationale for the suggestions.

Common Sense ADHD School Accommodations by Martin L. Kutscher, MD offers lots of ideas, with useful general principles at the top of this brief excerpt from his ebook. (I haven’t looked at the book.)

ADDinSchool is perhaps a bit commercial, but they’ve got some good ideas here on classroom structure that will benefit many kids.

Some accommodation suggestions from Idaho Special Eduction. These are oriented towards secondary students.

The Child Development Institute has some excellent suggestions. Notice that quite a few of these are structures a willing teacher might choose to set up. You can suggest any of those that might help your child, but such changes to overall structure are for the teacher to select, on the basis of what’s best for the whole classroom.

There are thousands of sites offering accommodations for ADHD. These few seemed to me to be commonsensical, and without a strong commercial agenda. If there are others you like, let us know!

Poudre SD counselors, it’s always a pleasure to meet with you. You had asked Brian, Jennifer and me to talk about current mental health issues in the community. I did a bit of an end run on the assignment. When you are sleep deprived, what are the effects on your behavior? Your emotions? Your ability to learn? Can we call the effects of sleep deprivation a mental health problem? If so, consider: It affects more secondary students than any other single condition. It is the most treatable condition.

The Facts
(See the links below for the details and the research.)

* Teens need more sleep than they did when they were younger or than they will as adults.

* Circadian rhythms change in adolescence: Teens feel sleepy later at night; they feel wakeful later in the morning. The pattern is physiologically driven; it isn’t a cultural effect.

* Most adolescents start their school day earlier than elementary students in the same district. This is backwards.

* As a result, U. S. adolescents are frequently sleep deprived. In one study, almost half of the students who began school at 7:20 were “pathologically sleepy” at 8:30, falling directly into REM sleep in an average of only 3.4 minutes–a pattern similar to what is seen in patients with narcolepsy.

The Effects
Sleep deprivation causes or is a causal factor in:
* Reduced alertness, concentration, cognition, memory, and understanding

* Poorer grades (and it appears that even 25 minutes less sleep correlates with grade swings)

* Traffic accidents

* Disciplinary problems

* Associations with depression and ADHD characteristics

* Difficulty controlling emotions and impulsivity.

What can we do about it?

* We can urge districts to respond to the science and start the secondary school day later. It sounds difficult: bus schedules, athletics, disruption of activities… In fact, many districts have made the change, with good academic results. (How logical is it to have a flat out focus on academic results, and systematically reduce the learning effectiveness of your students?)

* We can encourage late starts for students who are clearly not functional first and second periods.

* We can encourage good sleep hygiene, to help kids make the best of a bad situation. Bed is for sleeping, not for eating, TMing, gaming, watching TV, etc.

* We can explain that there is some evidence that the blue screens of monitors and TVs inhibit the production of melatonin. Light at that “blue” frequency tells the brain it’s daytime. Getting off screen an hour or more before bedtime may be helpful.

* We can help academically oriented teens who prepare for exams by studying far into the night realize that it may be better to be sharp in the morning than to study on. But there’s more: the hippocampus transfers new learning into long-term memory, and integrates it with other knowledge. When? During sleep. Learning without “sleeping on it” is pouring hard-earned knowledge into a sieve.

* A bandaid solution: Zombie Naps

The meat of it: Walking Zombies – Adolescent Sleep Deprivation

An ‘07 update: Teen Sleep

Update: The NY Times followed that Op-Ed with an editorial: Are You Up Yet?.
So which is it we should focus: bus and athletic schedules, or kids as learners?