Executive Functions - Home Grown Success - Junior Kids and Parents

This hybrid model course introduces students and parents to executive functions and the role they play in school and in life. Parents will attend with students for 4 classes to learn and practice tools and strategies in an interactive and fun way. In between each in-person student and parent class, parents will attend a virtual session to learn strategies at home that can support the ongoing development of executive functions in their child and ways, they can explicitly model and encourage the use of strategies and tools as a family.  

Students and parents explore each of the following Executive Functions:

• Organization
• Planning
• Prioritization
• Time Management
• Flexible Thinking
• Response Inhibition
• Stress Tolerance
• Working Memory
• Metacognition
• Emotional Regulation
• Sustained Attention

Students discover their own strengths and needs and learn to apply a wide variety of strategies and tools to support the development of their executive functions. Parents will learn to support their child's executive function development with tools and strategies they can apply at home. Parents will leave the course feeling more empowered in understanding their child's unique needs and what they look like in a school setting and which strategies already work well for them at home. Parents will gain the confidence to lead advocacy and support discussions with their child's school, having an understanding of which strategies work for their child.

Students get excited to learn that executive functions help us even when we are playing board games, sports and other activities we enjoy doing in our spare time. Students leave the course understanding more about who they are as a learner and person, understanding that we all have challenges with some executive functions, and realizing that there are many supports that exist to help all of us. When students create their own unique toolkit of strategies, they hold their own recipe for success in school and in life.