Executive Function Adventures
Play based 1:1 sessions for primary aged children designed by psychologists and child development experts.
What are executive function skills challenges and how do they manifest in children?
Children and young people with executive skills challenges are often bright and able, but find it difficult to manage their daily lives. These children are often seen as lazy and unmotivated which can often lead to the significant adults in their lives becoming increasingly frustrated by their apparent difficulty in doing the ‘basic things’ in life. Problems with task initiation, time-management, planning and organisation, shifting and task monitoring can have a significant impact both academically and behaviourally. The result can be a young person who is isolated from the significant adults in their lives and achieving well below their potential in school.
How can Executive Function Adventures (EFA) Help?
Find out more about our carefully designed and expertly delivered service.
Our Executive Function Adventures programme was born out of a desire to create an engaging and fun early intervention programme for children of primary school age and development. As believers in the benefits of early intervention, we identified that many children were struggling with their executive functions at home and in the classroom and needed support.
The programme combines one-to-one sessions with an executive function coach, alongside parent training in how to embed executive function skills development at home. By the end of the programme children and parents will have developed or improved their executive function literacy, and will also have practical strategies to use at home to foster improvements in executive function skills. When embedded over the long term children and parents have reported improved relationships at home and heightened self-confidence in using executive function skills at home and school.
Intro Session: Introductory meeting with the coach
Sessions 1-3: Teaching executive function skills using motivation
Sessions 4-6: Practicing executive function skills using a different area of motivation with added complexity
Sessions 7-10: Generalisation of executive function skills into the child’s environment; close liaison with parents
Research into the development of executive functioning clearly shows that new skills need to be generalised in a child’s environment; thus at Connections in Mind, we have developed, and tested, a programme which introduces these skills through play and later transfers these skills to real-life scenarios – such as packing a bag for school. The programme is most effective with skilled parental support at home, so parents are encouraged as part of the programme, to participate in our online Connected Minds Parent course.
