Homeschooling the Hyperactive

Hi, my name is Nan and I have a hyperactive child.

Here he is.

Oh wait a minute… that’s a kind of dated picture.

Here he is…

I love this child dearly. But this child is not fond of sitting at a desk. He’s not fond of having to look at books because it requires that he sit down to do so. Having said all of that, I can tell you this; he is not lacking in intelligence. He is one smart kid.

He just doesn’t like sitting down. Unless it’s for a movie, of course. Then he seems to have quite a long attention span, strangely enough.

As you might imagine, school can be a challenge for someone who despises having his bum glued to a chair. So you see, one must begin to become comfortable with doing things a little differently.

In an effort to bring his lessons up to speed with his energy level I have instituted a new methodology. We don’t do this every day. Some days we just do the whole glue-the-bum-to-the-chair-and-push-through-the-hard-lessons-whether-we-like-them-or-not-thing.

My new methodology is called Jumping School. Jumping Math. Jumping Phonics. Jumping fill in the blank.

Here is how Jumping Phonics works:

1. First get a pad of sticky notes and on them write all the letters of the alphabet as well as any phonetic digraphs (like Ch/sh/th/ou, etc.) you are currently working on with your child.
2. Then hand the stack of stickies to your child and ask them to take them to the kitchen and stick them all over the floor.

We have tile style linoleum so I asked the boys to please put one sticky note per square. We made a big long path through the kitchen.

It looked like the dotted line on a treasure map when we were done laying them all out. Just think of this as a modified form of hopscotch or something.

Then we played games. My younger one joined in too but I made my bigger boy work a little harder. Whenever we do this I come up with different rules that he has to follow. Initially I made him hop on each square that had a note. When he hopped on it he had to say the sound each letter makes (note: not the name of the letter).

After we did that, I changed the rules. I told him to run through the room trying not to step on any sticky notes.

If he stepped on one, I would yell FREEZE and he would have to go back to it and say the sound. We did this with hopping on one foot too. He had to try to dodge the stickies and if he landed on them, he had to say their sounds. Just to drag it out as long as possible, we did another full run through but this time he just had to walk slowly instead of hopping or dodging.

This is just one of the ways that I have learned to step out of the ordinary and really get creative for my boy who so dislikes his desk and the concept of silent contemplation. (Though let’s be real… he doesn’t merely dislike it, he has jumping beans filling his entire body cavity and is really almost physically unable to sit still or keep his eyes from being anywhere that they need to be. I say “almost” because he can… it’s just extremely difficult.)

Nan is the sassy wife of a hot reformed pastor. She's an American expat living in Canada. Her four sons make life like a veritable lunchbox. She blogs regularly at Life is Like a Lunchbox

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