Executive Function
 
Thursday, November 6, 2008
7:00 to 9:00 PM

Pike School
34 Sunset Rock Road
Andover, MA 01810

Does your child or student have issues that involve:
• Organization in the classroom, with homework and long-term assignments?
• Planning and Decision-Making?
• Impulsivity and regulating behavioral responses?
• Starting tasks?
• Stopping and moving on to new tasks?
• Pacing themselves within a given time frame?
...Then Your Child Needs to Learn the Art of Self Management

Who Should Attend?
Parents: of bright children who can achieve but need additional strategies to be organized and effectively manage their time, tasks and materials.     
Parents: of children who have learning challenges with associated executive function based weaknesses.    
Teachers: Who want to learn how to implement functional strategies into their classrooms which will foster the development of the executive function skills in their students.    
Professionals: Who work with children and adolescents who struggle to initiate, to be flexible in their thinking, to execute and complete tasks successfully and need to provide their patients and families with practical strategies.  
Strategies will be given to address the needs of children from ages 5 and older.  Multiple examples for younger and older children will be given.

What are the Executive Function Skills? 
The term Executive Function is used to describe the skill set associated with goal setting, carrying out organized steps and modifying a plan to complete a task successfully.

These skills are important for learning from past experiences and applying this knowledge to new experiences.  Attention, memory, impulse control, organization, planning, sensing time and hierarchical thinking are the executive function based skills that enable an individual to learn, generalize behaviors and complete tasks.

Young children rely on these skills to follow a sequence of instructions for daily tasks, while older children need these skills to "break a task down" into a sequence of steps and organize a time line as the demands for independent learning increase.

Sarah Ward, M.S., CCC/SLP 
Sarah has over 14 years experience in diagnostic evaluations, treatment and case management of children, adolescents and adults with a wide range of brain based learning difficulties and behavioral problems. A popular speaker, Sarah regularly presents on the topic of executive functions to a variety of professional and parent organizations. In addition to working directly with students in her private practice, she has presented to and consulted with more than 200 public and private schools in Massachusetts and across the United States on how to implement executive function based strategies into the classroom setting.

Co-sponsored by Andover SEPAC and Andover Parent to Parent