EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS FOUNDATIONAL COURSE
FOR STUDENTS ENTERING GRADES 3-9
1- EF for Parents
Parents will learn how they can support the strategies that their children will be learning about to strengthen their executive function skills and some hands-on methods of how to implement the strategies at home.
2 - Executive Functions
Students will learn about what executive functions are, the impact that they have in our daily lives, how they affect school and home, and become aware of areas that they may want to begin strengthening.
3 - Situational Awareness
Students will learn about how to read a room and gather information about what is happening at that time. They will begin to understand their role, become aware of how long the task should take, the materials they need, and to stop and think before acting so they can proceed as expected.
4 - Flexible Thinking
Students will learn about flexible thinking by envisioning their future self and working to develop stated intentions to enable planning for various situations and circumstances. They will also learn generalizing when things are similar but different.
5 - Time Awareness
Students will become aware of time, practice moving through time, develop strategies to help them stay on track and avoid time robbers, and begin to think about associative tasks to take into consideration when thinking about time.
6 - Do & Follow Through
Using representational gesture and mime, students will develop foresight about what actually doing a task looks like, understanding the steps involved and be able to see themselves completing these tasks.
7 - Planning
Students will learn about the three components of planning, how to plan backwards by breaking tasks into small, manageable parts, and how to be prepared adequately and independently for task completion.
8 - Implementation
Students will choose 1-2 strategies learned and develop a plan of action to use these techniques at home. For the last 20 minutes of the session, parents will be asked to join, go over the plan, and work to support its implementation.