 When a child with ADHD or some other reason to need input requires extra stimulation and more sensory input and activating, how can you do that when they are perhaps trying to get on with maths? That's what we're going to think about in today's episode. Let's dive straight in. Okay so today we are thinking about children and young people who require extra input. So this is often going to be kids who have ADHD, but there might be other reasons why children might require a bit of stimulation. Sometimes this can be as simple as perhaps things have gotten into a little bit of a low in your class if you're teaching or in your group and you think there's a bit of a need for activation. We're thinking that feeling, that post-lunch feeling, some of us get at conferences where we're just kind of drifting away from things and we need a little bit of something to just up and bring us back into the room. This is particularly important for those children and young people who have got sensory needs that mean that they require that additional stimulation because if they are going to focus in class or in other activities they need this input in order to stay mentally in the room. But we all need it sometimes and you'll find as I work through these ideas that some of them will feel familiar and you'll think yeah I do that sometimes. I wiggle in my chair when I feel like I'm getting a bit bored in the middle of a meeting just to keep myself here. So anything kind of goes here you're just trying to find ways that we can create some input to get the body feeling a little bit more different to get the brain back on track when we're starting to get a bit distant. So don't feel like you have to stick to these ideas these are just a few that can work in a setting where we're trying to generally be calm and quiet. So where a kid really wants to jump around, run around, climb the walls, get some input but they're trying to learn trigonometry at the same time and so are their 29 classmates. So what can you do? A few ideas here. One is to over stretch your fingers. You can do this absolutely anywhere and giving your fingers a really good stretch and actually thinking about the feeling in your hands and you can practice this with a child and actually just think about how it feels and you might have different routines for doing it. Running your hands up and down and see how that feels. Think about how it feels in your hands. How does that stretch feel in your fingers? Can you feel it anywhere else in your body and you might almost do like a bit of a like Mexican wave down through but you see even just with your hands making no noise causing no disruption you can very simply begin to make things feel a little bit different and get some focus into a part of your body. Now the key thing here it provides a bit of different sensory input it kind of wakes us up and gives us something new to focus on. We're looking for change for stimulation so that's simple simple thing and of course this could work for any part of your body but your fingers and over stretching them are something you've got right a liter hand. So over stretching your fingers is idea number one. Number two is about changing your posture so one of things that can happen is we get kind of like stuck where we sat and maybe we've been sat in our seat for a really long time and we've kind of like molded to our seat and we're a bit bored and whatever. Just actually changing how we sit moving ourselves around a bit getting our bum wiggled into position thinking about how we're holding our bodies, sit up straighter or slouching for a while, wrapping our feet around the chair. Any of those things just to sort of change how we're sitting. I love to sit on my feet I do that a lot or I might go and sit somewhere else and go and sit cross-legged change my chair, wrap my feet around the legs of chair, lots of kids will rile on their chair though we often have health and safety concerns about that but moving around how we sit. Just a note here for teachers, parents, carers, the adults in the room sometimes we tell children off for sitting on their seat in the wrong way maybe they are sitting on their feet maybe they do have their feet wrapped around the chair legs. What I'd say is that often when a kid is doing this this is them self-regulating trying to stay in the room trying to stay focused and kind of moving themselves around in this way and changing the way their body is and their posture altering is a way of trying to focus and concentrate so the challenge is is this actually causing any harm to anyone? Is it dangerous to the child because for example riling on the chair will provide them the input they need but you might worry that they're going to fall backwards and crack their head open so you might ask them not to fair enough but wrapping their legs around the chair or sitting on their feet is it doing any harm is it causing any harm to anyone else is it all right if we just let them quietly get on with it does it really matter exactly how they sit on the chair and sometimes the answer is yes it's going to do them harm yes it is distracting other people yes we do need to ask them to stop and that's fine but where is actually just not maybe let them sit on the chair in a different way just a little healthy challenge there because we do do quite a lot of sit up properly feet down on the floor you know and maybe it's not necessary just asking so we've over stripped our fingers we thought about changing our posture that might not just be moving in the chair might actually have a child sort of stand up move around just something that makes our body feel a bit different however we're holding it right now particularly if our body has been held in that position for some time getting up and move around and this is where our little movement breaks can really come in a child having a 60 second movement break can make a really big difference you might ask them to run a quick errand for you might get to hand out some books if they're looking like that just beginning to really disengage and relax into the chair and no longer in the zone of learning you might get them to staple a bunch of stuff you might just get them kind of moving get that posture changing so they're moving out of the position into which they have set so we've overstretched our fingers we've changed our posture next one we can pull or massage our ears is a great we take them everywhere and because they're in the face then we've got quite a lot of good sensory input going in there they're pretty sensitive so give them a pull give them a rub just sort of play around with them a bit kids you've got earrings might want to twist them and fiddle with them and that sort of thing but just having a general play with our ears again we take them everywhere it's not going to do anyone any harm if we give our ears a bit of a tug now the one in terms of bits we take everywhere with us bits of our body that we can have a go with rolling our shoulders so rolling the shoulders or hunching them up to our ears and then back down again when we're feeling like a cold spring and we actually want to run around jump around all that kind of thing moving of the shoulders can be a fairly big movement that's not going to cause big disruption in class and you might do this kind of with a child you might encourage them to do it or you might notice them once you've taught them doing it in the middle of your lesson or group and that's cool and this is something that if you are parent or carer and you are for example taking your child out somewhere where they're going to need to sit for some time they're kind of rolling the shoulders is something they can do without being seen to be disruptive and rude and all those things and yes we should be trying to provide our children with kind of proper sensory breaks and allowing them to step away but sometimes that's not quite possible and being able to roll the shoulders a little bit move them around can be super helpful so these are all things that are designed to be able to done with nothing with no extra input wherever you are because there are other things that would help here like for example you might have a child sit on a wobble cushion or a yoga ball which would allow them to change that posture and get that extra input by moving around and getting that but that involves having things buying things bringing them with you so these are things that you can do without that so we've overstretched our fingers we changed our posture in any way moved around changed our sitting we've pulled or we've massaged our ears and got that sensory input near the face and we've rolled or raised and lowered our shoulders next one is you could allow a child to work or continue whatever activity is that they are doing standing up so just going from sitting to standing can make a big difference it totally changes the sensory input that we're getting we're suddenly feeling our feet connecting with the floor we're standing up straight our spine's getting some input and things do feel rather different having the ability to move between tasks that involve sitting at a desk and standing up can make a difference to how engaged your ADHD learner is going to be able to be and for what it's worth this doesn't just occur in ADHD learners children adults as well so if you are an adult with ADHD or someone who just requires that additional sensory input every now and then actually thinking about you know could use a standing desk or could you every now and then stand up and move around a bit I do a lot of my thinking on foot so if I'm trying to work out six ideas say for activating in ADHD I'm sometimes going to do that set at my desk with pen and paper sometimes I'm going to get on my feet and I'm going to go walk around my house and I do laps of our upstairs floor here whilst I'm thinking and those ideas do tend to flow as I'm moving around so being able to get up change that position to just get our brains back in gear get us connecting in a different way with our environment and provide that input and that is possible for some but not for all but just a total change of position super helpful and then finally this one does involve a little bit of things but using a fidget toy so there are so many different fidget toys and if you want some ideas of quiet ones that you can use in the classroom then I would recommend my daughter Lyra's YouTube video that you can find on my YouTube channel which is quiet fidgets for the classroom but you can use almost anything as long as it's not going to irritate other people and it doesn't have to be an official fidget toy although you can get hundreds of them very very cheaply these days but anything you can squeeze or fiddle with or pull and that is going to get you kind of moving your hands around and focusing in on some slightly different feelings can make a big difference but key focus here is going to be within a setting with other people what can you do in terms of those fidgets or things that you've created yourself that's not going to completely drive everyone around you absolutely out of their minds so thinking about here what can you fidget with that's okay so one of the things that kids will often do is clicking on and off that might be the fidget they have to hand that for you as a teacher might make you want to throw that child out of the window and I wouldn't recommend that it doesn't go down too well with the child with the child's family and actually you tend to feel a bit bad about it yourself so we're not going to throw them out the window so instead we might think well they need that input right now how can they get it in a different way have we got a quiet fidget a little chain fidget or something squidgy that they can play with even just sort of squeezing a rubber or playing with laces or anything that you might have to hand it's quiet can make a difference here but the thing is that often will take the pen off them fine that's fine and that's no longer irritating us and everyone else if that child actually needed that input needed something different they're really struggling to stay in the room and they're beginning to sort of distance themselves because they need a bit of activation we've got to replace it with something else so the key thing here to remember is that some children particularly those with ADHD will find that if they don't get enough stimulation enough activation from their environment they will get quite sort of under responsive now what's going to happen here they're either going to seek that sensory input in some way and sometimes I can get rather interesting in our classrooms as they seek to create different input for themselves some of them do it very well and quietly and they've learned strategies and that's fantastic and they should be praised and encouraged or if they don't get that input then they usually just going to fall into a bit of a Dwarm they're going to become very distant very sort of unresponsive disconnected almost just exiting the room almost like someone's pressed the sleep button on them and it's not optimal for learning and it's not especially fun or nice for them either so we're going to try and keep them in the room find whatever we can to keep them here so the ideas were over stretching the fingers changing the posture pulling or massaging the ears rolling of the shoulders standing up and working on our feet if we can or using some sort of quiet fidget toy I hope there were some ideas in here that got you thinking some ideas you thought you could use with a child or young person that you had in mind or perhaps some to try for yourself good luck and let me know on the socials what other ideas you would add or which ones work particularly well for you or your child until next time over and out