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What are Executive Functioning Skills?
What are Executive Functioning Skills?
Executive function and self-regulation skills are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. Our brains need these skill sets to help with distractions, prioritize tasks, set and achieve goals, and control impulses.
We aren't born with these skills but are born with the ability to learn them. Adults can help the development of these skills in children by establishing routines, modeling positive social behavior, and creating and maintaining supportive, reliable relationships.
It is also important for children to exercise their developing skills through activities that foster creative play and social connection, teach them how to cope with stress, involve vigorous exercise, and over time, provide opportunities for directing their own actions with decreasing adult supervision.
Executive Functioning Skills
Executive Functioning Skills
There are eight main executive functioning skills: Impulse Control, Emotional Control, Flexible Thinking, Working Memory, Self-Monitoring, Planning & Prioritizing, Task Initiation, and Organization. Below are some strategies that you can use to help your children foster these skills in every day life.
Impulse Control: helps a student think before acting
Impulse Control: helps a student think before acting
Strategies to Improve:
Wait 5 - count to five before verbally responding in a large group setting
Wait 3 - count to three before responding in small groups or in pairs to allow think time
Play games like Simon Says and Red Light, Green Light.
Practice Mindfulness
Emotional Control: helps a student keep his/her feelings in check
Emotional Control: helps a student keep his/her feelings in check
Strategies to Improve:
Help students see the relationship between their thoughts and feelings
Flexible Thinking: allows students to adjust to the unexpected
Flexible Thinking: allows students to adjust to the unexpected
Strategies to Improve:
Weekly journal prompts that require students to explain things from multiple perspectives
Working Memory: helps students keep key information in the forefront
Working Memory: helps students keep key information in the forefront
Strategies to Improve:
Memory Games
Engage multiple senses when learning information
Self-Monitoring: helps a student evaluate how they are doing
Self-Monitoring: helps a student evaluate how they are doing
Strategies to Improve:
Stop & Look - intentional pauses to stop and assess what students are doing, how are they feeling, what is their engagement level, and are they making progress towards a goal (why or why not?)
Wait 3: count to three
Planning & Prioritizing: helps students decide on a goal and a plan to meet it
Planning & Prioritizing: helps students decide on a goal and a plan to meet it
Strategies to Improve:
Create mock projects like video games, books, music albums, businesses, or apps and then map out how to accomplish that goal
Develop and write out SMART goals
Create To-Do Lists
Task Initiation: helps a student take action and get started
Task Initiation: helps a student take action and get started
Strategies to Improve:
Create lists of tasks to complete and brainstorm different places to start
Use a count-down timer
Read directions aloud
Use brain breaks between tasks
Organization: helps a student keep track of things both physically and mentally
Organization: helps a student keep track of things both physically and mentally
Strategies to Improve:
Checklists, planners, and organizational applications
Color-code binders and materials
Use graphic organizers before writing
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