How attention difficulty affects reading

It is easy to misunderstand what attention deficit really is. It looks like it is a problem with too much energy in the brain making it hard to focus, and effective drugs were sedatives.

But in fact, the meds for ADHD/ADD are stimulants, because the true cause is actually a lack of energy or control in the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe moderates where you put your focus, and insufficient input there means a bit of neurological chaos everywhere else.

Learning to read is a higher brain function, and you need to be able to exert enough focus to manage that decoding-blending-comprehension process effectively.

Fixing attention issues in the reading process

You have to make the learning process engaging enough for the learner, and perhaps even more importantly, chunked into short manageable pieces. We have had hundreds and hundreds of children with diagnosed attention issues complete the Easyread system. They never seem to struggle with focus throughout the process. The main reasons seem to be that:

• the lessons are very short (a max of 15 minutes)
• the gamification element whets their appetite for more and acts as a stimulant
• the regular progress and reward system motivates them

You can use 3 similar tenets in whatever reading practice you are using.

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