Let’s face it. Taking a test is a stressful experience for almost everybody. I mean, you’re being quizzed on what you remember from weeks and weeks of classes in a silent room and you can’t ask for help. How could it not be stressful, right?

For kids with ADHD, test taking can be extremely frustrating. There are so many distractions! If you’re testing in a room with other kids, you can easily spend the entire testing period just watching them. And trying to organize your thoughts and focus under pressure can make it almost impossible for your brain to function at all.

Not all homeschoolers administer standardized tests, but usually there will come a time when our kids have to take an exam of some kind. We’ve learned some great test taking tips for ADHD kids that we’re happy to share with you today!

Test Taking Tips for ADHD Students

Rest and eat well before the test.

Getting plenty of sleep the night before the exam is critical to doing well. Unfortunately, resting in general can be difficult for kids with ADHD, so we can help our kids by establishing a good bedtime routine before the exam, so that they’ll be in the habit of preparing for sleep long before they face the anxiety of testing day.

Earlier in this series, we talked about the value of a protein-heavy diet for people with ADHD. Eating a good meal with plenty of protein before an exam can also make it easier for the ADHD brain to focus on the material at hand.

Practice, practice, practice.

Practice exams are an excellent way to help kids prepare for the big day. If you’re creating and administering your own tests for your homeschool, such as for a subject exam, give your kids a few pop quizzes on concepts they’ve mastered. These smaller quizzes can help them isolate key concepts to study for the full test later on.

If your kids are getting ready for a standardized test, take advantage of online practice tests. There are practice tests for the ITBS, CRCT, SAT, ACT, and just about any other standardized test you can think of. When you administer the practice exam, try to recreate the testing environment: no talking, no bathroom breaks, and a set time limit. This will make the actual test experience a little less frightening.

Sit in the front of the room.

This one is a tip that personally works for me. I attend college online, but I had to take a few final exams on campus last semester. It was the first time I had taken a standardized test in over a decade, so I was not thrilled.

This time, though, I sat in the very front row of the class. The room was full of people, but I hardly noticed them. It was just me and the Scantron. That was a huge help, because I had very little to distract me.

If your child will be taking a test in a group, encourage him or her to sit as close to the front of the room as possible. Cutting down on visual distractions can go a long way to test taking success.

Get even more test taking tips for homeschoolers, including kids with ADHD, in our free printable “Test Taking Strategies for Homeschoolers”! This printable includes five suggestions that kids can use during the test to make it easier to pass their exams the first time. Download your free copy below!

>>>>> Test Taking Strategies for Homeschoolers <<<<<

Have your ADHD kids struggled with test taking? How do you help them conquer their pre-exam butterflies? Tell us your suggestions in the comments!

Don’t miss these other posts about teaching children with ADHD!

Plus, get even more suggestions for homeschooling kids with ADHD successfully in my book Homeschooling with ADHD!

This post is part of 31 Tips for ADHD Homeschooling series! Stop by tomorrow for Day 26: Managing Screen Time for Kids with ADHD!

We homeschool, but I believe strongly in the value of homework. I realize that this is probably a carryover from my public school education, but I think it can be valuable (if done right).

Tigger is the only child in our family who has homework, since she’s in fourth grade this year. I don’t assign much and I allow her some flexibility as to how she completes it. But there are days when she has trouble getting it done anyway.

If you assign homework to your ADHD homeschoolers, try these tips to help them complete their work. Even if you’re not homeschooling, though, you can benefit from these homework strategies for ADHD kids!

Image: Monkey Business / Dollar Photo Club

Homework Strategies for ADHD Kids

Have the kids eat before they get started.

No one can concentrate on an empty stomach, right? Naturally, our kids need food for their brains in order to maintain focus on their assignments. If your kids are coming in from public school, it’s very likely that they’re hungry. Serve them a protein-heavy snack paired with a complex carb (think: apple and peanut butter) and a glass of water before they begin.

If you’re homeschooling, try to assign homework after snack time. In our family, Tigger does homework after the morning snack before she hits the lunchtime hyper hour. 🙂

Fight the urge to procrastinate.

Kids and adults who have ADHD tend to procrastinate if they have a deadline that’s too far into the future. To avoid this, encourage your kids to start on their homework right away. Add an incentive by giving them a soft deadline. For example, if your child has a particular television show she wants to watch, challenge her by asking her to finish the homework before the show begins.

We don’t watch much live television, but I require Tigger to finish her homework before we watch anything that day. Once it’s done, I review it and if there are a lot of errors, I have her fix them before we begin. (A lot of errors implies that she was rushing in an attempt to get to the TV.)

Supplement with additional resources.

If your child is struggling with homework because he is confused about a topic, stop and offer him some additional help. Tigger and I had to review multiplication several times before it finally started to click. I would assign her homework, thinking that I was reinforcing our lessons, but until she really understood the concept, there was no point in doing endless worksheets about it.

We took a break from multiplication for a while and came back to it a few weeks later. I supplemented with a few math programs, and when she finally understood it, I went back to assigning her homework. This time, she had a much easier time getting the work done.

Do your kids with ADHD struggle to complete their homework? If you’re homeschooling, do you even bother with homework? Tell us in the comments!

This post is part of the 31 Days of ADHD Homeschooling series! Stop by tomorrow for Day 24: How to Calm Your Frustrated ADHD Learners!

If you have kids who are living with ADHD, you’ve probably experienced this scenario:

You assign your child some schoolwork. You walk away. You come back 15 minutes later and your child is sitting in the exact same position he was in when you left. You look at the schoolwork. He has managed to write his name and that’s it.

You ask: “What have you been doing all this time?!?” The answer you get is: “Um….” or “I don’t know. I was just….”

As frustrating as this sounds, it is pretty normal. Since kids who have ADHD have a hard time maintaining their focus long enough to finish something, it can seem as if your child will never learn how to do his schoolwork without you standing right there.

The good news is that our kids with ADHD can learn how to work independently, but they’ll need some help from us to do it.

Tips for Helping Kids with ADHD to Work Independently

Start with bite-sized assignments.

Start small, and I mean very small. If you use worksheets, assign your child ONE problem or question and ask him to complete it before you come back into the room. If that goes well, assign ONE more. If that one goes well, assign ONE more, then stop.

At this point, it doesn’t matter if the work is done correctly. It may not be. In fact, your child’s answers may not even be in the same galaxy with the right answer. But if he did the work on his own, that’s a victory for that day.

Stay close to your child while he works.

I got this idea from a fabulous blog post by Coach Carlene, and it really does work. Stay in the same general vicinity with your child. Don’t stand around waiting for her to finish, because that can just make her anxious. But remain near enough to observe discreetly.

When Tigger does her independent work, I try to stay nearby. If she’s at the dining room table, I’ll use that time to clean the kitchen. If she’s working on the sofa, I’ll go fold laundry on the other side of the living room. Just having me in her line of sight does wonders for her focus.

Give lots of praise.

When your child completes something on his own for the very first time, shower him with praise! Don’t focus on the accuracy of the work. Even if it’s accurate, that’s not the goal (yet).

The goal is for him to stick with his work without needing you to prod him along. If he does that today and you give praise for it, he’s more likely to try again tomorrow.

Have you had trouble helping your kids with ADHD work on their own? How do you encourage them to work independently? Share your tips in the comments!

This post is part of the 31 Days of ADHD Homeschooling series! Stop by tomorrow for Day 23: Homework Strategies for ADHD Kids!

We’ve been talking about ADHD all month long – what it is, how it affects people who have it, and how the brain of a person who has ADHD operates. If you’re just finding our series or if your eyes have glazed over because of all the posts so far, don’t worry! Today we’re going to start talking about what we can do to help our kids with ADHD learn. 🙂

One of the main concerns for people who have ADHD is maintaining focus, not just attention, but focus. Focus is what helps us start a project, pay attention to it, and complete it. For many people with ADHD (like myself), starting projects and assignments is easy. It’s the finishing that gives us the most trouble.

If you’re homeschooling (or even if your kids attend public school), they’ve got to learn how to finish their assignments, whether they have ADHD or not. But if you’re teaching them at home, you’ll have a lot more room to adapt as a teacher. So – here are a few homeschool teaching tips for ADHD kids that you can try this week!

Homeschool Teaching Tips for ADHD Kids

Use lots and lots of energy.

Now when I say “lots of energy”, I mean LOTS OF ENERGY. Think Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society. Stand on tables, jump up and down, burst into song in the middle of a sentence…you get the idea. And I’m only half joking.

The days that our school lessons went the best were the days that I came out and put on a show during class. When I make the lesson memorable, the kids pay attention and do a better job of focusing. Not only that, they actually remembered it the next day. (My personal struggle is being consistent with this, which as a mom with ADHD, I’m not.)

Remove any distractions.

Depending on the type of stimuli your children respond to, you might have to get rid of lots of things in your school space. My kids are easily distracted by visual stimuli, so I had to take down my beautiful map of the world which hung on the wall in front of our dining room table.

I loved that map, but every time I stood in front of it to teach, my kids’ eyes went directly to Murmansk, not me. Our homeschool room is pretty boring now, but the kids have done better work this year.

Separate siblings, if necessary.

As much as I liked the idea of a one-room schoolhouse type of class, I ended up having to separate some of my kids, especially during certain subjects. My two oldest kids are very competitive, and the younger one will try to rush through his work to catch up with his older sister.

So I started having him do his work separately. Without that peer pressure, his work improved immensely. Plus, Tigger had an easier job staying focused on her lessons.

Do you have any tips for teaching kids with ADHD? Feel free to share them in the comments!

This post is part of the 31 Days of ADHD Homeschooling series! Stop by tomorrow for Day 22: How to Get Your ADHD Child to Work Independently!

There are some homeschoolers who don’t use worksheets at all. There are some who use them all the time. Then there are homeschoolers like me. I use them with my kids, but only at certain times.

When I first started homeschooling Tigger, I was much stricter about using worksheets. “No, you can’t get up until you finish ALL of the problems!” I can’t remember how many times I uttered that sentence. Of course, at the time I had no idea that she had ADHD.

Now that I know more about what happens inside the mind of a child with ADHD, I’ve adjusted the way we use worksheets. We still use them, but with a different goal in mind.

Rather than using worksheets as the basis of our lessons, I use them to reinforce concepts and to help my kids get used to the structure of sit-down learning. There’s a possibility that they may go to school eventually, and I want them to be at least be familiar with this style of education. So, here’s a look at how we use worksheets with our ADHD kids!

Image: bigandt / Dollar Photo Club

How to Use Worksheets with ADHD Kids

Assign one worksheet at a time.

When you’re first starting out, it’s probably best to assign no more than one or two worksheets at a time. Kids, even kids who don’t have ADHD, can get overwhelmed by the sight of several worksheets to do. We can keep them from mentally checking out by giving them one assignment at a time until they adjust to them.

Depending on your child’s style of ADHD, you might even have to break up that single worksheet into sections. And that’s perfectly fine! If Tigger has a math worksheet with several rows of problems, I usually tell her to do two rows and let me check them. After a break, she completes more until we get them all done.

Keep the atmosphere light.

Don’t make completing the worksheet the measure of your child’s understanding. I’ve done this before and it was a disaster. There have been several times when I thought Tigger should have been able to complete the worksheet in a timely manner if she truly understood the lesson. So, I would make her do assignment after assignment after assignment until she could complete them quickly.

When I finally just started asking her to tell me about what we covered, I found out that she could practically recite it from memory. She could express the concepts verbally but the requirement of sitting down and writing it on paper was not her thing.

Now, I use a teaching style that is more conversational and I notice that she pays attention better and she remembers the concepts better. (We’ll talk more about teaching tips for ADHD in tomorrow’s post.)

Make room for movement.

Don’t forget to let your kids move! If they sit down for 10 minutes to do a worksheet, they’ll probably need to get up and take a brain break soon afterwards.

Depending on your child’s age, they may even need to take a movement break in the middle of the worksheet. After a little movement, they may actually have a clearer mind and complete their work more accurately.

Do you use worksheets in your homeschool? Have you made adjustments so that your kids with ADHD can complete them? Do you absolutely hate worksheets? Tell us in the comments!

This post is part of the 31 Days of ADHD Homeschooling series! Stop by tomorrow for Day 21: Teaching Tips for ADHD Homeschooling!

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably been there. Standing in front of your child, struggling to keep your voice calm while saying, “I’m going to count to five, and if you don’t stop screaming by then….” In fact, I think I just did this a few days ago.

Lots of parenting books offer suggestions for how we can help kids to calm down and listen, but there aren’t a lot of books about how parents can calm down. All parents get frustrated and irritated by their kids, but for parents with ADHD, these everyday irritations can lead to major blowups.

For the longest time, I couldn’t understand why I had days when I was perfectly equipped to manage my kids and then I had days when every little thing they did would set me off. But that’s the inconsistency of ADHD for you. I’ve also learned that there are certain “triggers” that cause me to overreact and, now that I know what they are, I’m having an easier time managing my emotions.

So, today I’m sharing a few of my personal calming tips for parents with ADHD!

Calming Tips for Parents Who Have ADHD

Identify your “buttons”.

As I mentioned above, the first thing I had to do was to pay attention to my “buttons”. You know, the ones that kids always find a way to push? 🙂 These buttons are different for every parent. Some parents are oblivious to loud noise and don’t mind it at all. Others need a quieter atmosphere.

Here’s my trigger: Noise from several sources ALL AT THE SAME TIME. And, of course, I decided to have four children who tend to recreate this exact environment. When I have one child on the floor shouting “Mom!”, while another is in the kitchen doing schoolwork and shouting “Mom!”, and two more are in the room calling “Mom!”, I tend to lose it.

So, my solution is to avoid that scenario whenever possible. I set one child up with an activity, then another, and another – until everyone has something they are assigned to do. I tell them to come and sit down in the living room quietly when they finish and then wait for me to explain the next thing. That keeps everyone from yelling “Mom!” at the same time.

Know your limits.

Stop overcommitting. Just stop it. And I know this is hard for a lot of us who are living with ADHD, because we really do want to do every single thing. But overcommitting puts such a strain on your brain, which may already be not performing at its best, that it can make you into an angry mom.

I’ve been attending college, working, and homeschooling my kids for the past couple of years. It was going fairly well until my husband went back to work full-time this past summer. He had been saving me by watching the kids when I studied. But after that, it was totally on me to keep the kids on task with their schooling, take care of the house, get my work done, and take my classes. Suddenly, I turned into some kind of Mother/Incredible Hulk hybrid. It was not pretty.

Recently, I’ve been reevaluating my choices, which I’ll talk about in a future post. And I’ll be cutting some of my obligations back, so that I can go back to happy mama mode again.

Cut out the multitasking.

Okay, this one is particularly hard for many parents with ADHD. If you have a brain that’s going in multiple directions, you’re probably used to feeling like Stretch Armstrong. (Remember those stretchy dolls you can pull in all directions?)

Unfortunately, that’s our natural inclination but it’s usually not the best thing for us. Many people with ADHD perform best when they can do lots of things in a single day, but one thing at a time. And I’ve found that to be true.

If the kids are in the living room watching TV and I’m trying to study, I’m going to be irritable when they interrupt me. (Which they will.) Now I know better. I sit out there with them and do something that doesn’t require intense concentration, like meal planning or writing a post like this. That way, I’m less irritated by interruptions, which keeps me calm.

Have you struggled with keeping your cool as a parent? Share your calming tips for parents with ADHD in the comments!

This post is part of the 31 Days of ADHD Homeschooling series! Stop by tomorrow for Day 20: How to Use Worksheets with Your ADHD Child!