STRUGGLES
for Kids with ADHD and Strategies to Help
R emember the common “m ad
minute” ex ercise? It was a short
quiz o f about
m ultiplication
problems that you had to try and
complete in one minute. For most
young minds, those
s econds were
seriously stressful.

ow, imagine doing that ex ercise, but
at the same time not being able to keep
track of all these operations in your
head, and constantly losing focus on the
problem. This is what most AD
children face
when they look at a math problem.

AD
and math don’ t seem to be a
natural fit, and there are various
factors that go into why math is so
difficult for kids with ADHD.

So here is a break down of some of the
struggles AD
kids face in math class,
along with ways to help make sure your
child’ s math foundation is strong.

ADHD and Math: The issue
at hand
Students who are affected by ADHD
often have a hard time with math
because their memory is not very strong
and blocking out ex ternal stimuli is a
struggle.

emory, which is where information is
stored for later use, is one of the many
executive functions. Executive functions
18 October 2018
washingtonFAMILY.com BY CHRISTINE ROSENFELD
refer to skills such as reasoning, task
switching and planning. Kids with
ADHD do not have strong executive
function skills, which significantly
affects their performance in school. This
brings us to the first struggle:
Struggle 1: Word problems are
overwhelming Take this word problem, for example: A
f oot ladder is leaning against a house
and a hose is stretched from the base
of the house to the garden and passes
the ladder after 8 feet and you have to
figure out the height of the house and
the angle of the ladder to the house.

Wait, what
ust happened? If you read
the problem above and got confused
or
oned out, you’ re like many people
who dread word problems. For
students with AD
, the stumbling
block with word problems lies in the
combination of words and numbers
that make it difficult to store the
information in their memory as they
progress through the problem. Even if
the student is able to follow along with
the problem, when it comes time to
solve it, all of their energy and focus is
already used up!
word problem into chunks, allowing
the student to place
ust a small piece
of information into his head. Adding
a tactile and visual dimension to
his learning by drawing part of the
problem at a time only strengthens his
memory. Check out the ex ample image. It shows
what the picture might look like as
your child is reading. By the end of
reading the word problem, he will have
completed the drawing, in the bottom
right. Taking this piece- by- piece approach to
reading and drawing might mean that
your child might have to change the
original drawing as he goes, but that’ s
K. It’ s important to get something on
the page before he finishes reading the
whole problem.

Solution? Tackle it piece by piece
Struggle 2: Confusion with Order
of Operations
Have your student read the problem
in small parts and draw a picture of
the part he
ust read. This breaks the
Remember
PEMDAS (Please Excuse
y
ear Aunt Sally)
It’ s an acronym
that stands for parentheses, ex ponents,
Getty Images/selimaksan
MATH