Development of pre-requisite skills which includes letter sounds associations, identification of sight words, recognition of vowel, variant vowel sounds, and affixes. These skills are best developed if a specific block of time is set aside each to focus on them. Direct Instruction can be extremely beneficial. Lessons are highly structured and scripted. Responses are modelled for the student. The structure and repetition of the lessons leads to on-line processing of information. Teaching is reciprocal, in that, the instructor is constantly checking in with the student to ensure that he or she is learning. “Direct Instruction Reading” by Douglas Carine, Jerry Silbert, and Edward Kameenui (Prentice Hall, 1996) is one resource. Other suggestions include the grapheme level activities outlined in “Phonological Awareness Kit-Intermediate” and activities such as deletions (i.e., Rosner activities) and substitutions (i.e., Lindamood activities).
	Practice in word identification strategies. Specific strategies include (a) Rhyming or being taught a list of relatively simple words containing common spelling patterns (e.g., look) and then being taught how to compare new, unfamiliar words to the list (e.g., book, nook, shook, brook, etc); (b) Vowel alert or being taught that each vowel sounds has a short and a long sound and how to use different sound to make a real word (e.g., “I see the vowel ‘o” in this word. First I’ll try ”o” as in “go”. Next I’ll try ‘o’ as in “dog”. That sounds like a read word.”); (c) I Spy or being taught how to look for small words or parts for words in longer, more difficult words (e.g., identify ‘bad’, ‘in’, and ‘on’ in the word “badminton”); and (d) Peeling off, or being taught how to identify and remove prefixes and suffixes before using another strategy to read the root word.
	Use of learning to learn strategies. These strategies include verbal scripts that an individual can use when approaching a new task or word. The highly scripted approach to direct instruction exposes a child to this as do the examples outlined in number 2 above.

Follow a structured daily routine.. School and household routines help the inattentive child to accept order. Keep the times for wake-up, meals, snacks, chores, naps, and bed as regular as possible. Try to keep your environment relatively quiet because this encourages thinking, listening, and reading at home. In general, leave the radio and TV off. Predictable daily events help your child’s responses become more predictable.

Maintain firm discipline. Children with attention difficulties need more carefully planned discipline than the average child. Rules should be formulated mainly to prevent harm to your child and to others. Aggressive behavior, such as biting, hitting, and pushing, should be no more accepted in an inattentive or hyperactive child than in the normal child.

Stretch your child’s attention span. Encouraging attentive behavior is the key to preparing your child for school. Increased attention span and persistence with tasks can be taught at home. Be sure to praise your child when he plays independently. Set aside several brief periods each day to teach your child listening skills by reading to him. Teach games to your child, gradually increasing the difficulty by starting with building blocks and progressing to puzzles, dominoes, card games, and dice games. Later, consequence games such as checkers or tic-tac-toe can be introduced. When your child becomes restless, stop the activity and return for another session later. Plan to have your child do homework and other tasks that require concentration in short blocks of time with breaks in between. Try having your child study with low-level background sound such as white noise or instrumental music. Do homework and studying away from the sounds of television, radio, or others talking but where adults can supervise.

Flexible Problem Solving:
This skill typically develops with age and is required more at school when a child reaches his or her teen years. Flexible problem solving requires the ability to generate ideas, as well as to maintain and/or shift thought processes. Individuals with difficulties in this area may have trouble dealing with ambiguity or getting “unstuck” from an automatic way of responding.

Teachers and parents can help students in this area by making the steps involved in an assignment or daily activity more explicit (e.g., provide “cheat” sheets or templates that outline the steps required to write the essay, to analyse and solve math problems etc). Embed questions designed to prompt the individual into using analytical skills. Questions can include “How did you solve that problem?” “Can you think of another way of doing that?”, “What can you do to help remember that information”. Teach the individual a set of questions to ask him/herself when confronted with a problem, such as: “What is my problem? What is my plan? Am I following my plan? How did I do?”. In other words have the individual identify the problem, develop a solution strategy, self-monitor his or her performance and evaluate the outcome.

The Learning Toolbox website (http://coe.jmu.eud/Learn¬ing Toolbox/) is designed for secondary students with specific learning challenges (e.g., organization, problem solving, attention etc) as well as for their teachers and their parents. The student section includes tools to help the student improve in many areas (e.g. Study skills, test taking, advanced thinking, organization) by providing templates to follow.

Behavior:
Children and adolescents who are not doing well in school may not feel good about themselves. If they feel they can’t cope, they may withdraw from their friends and social activities. Social difficulties were raised by parents of children and adolescents with SDS on ques¬tionnaires. Two resources to foster social competence are:

	“No one to play with: Social problems of LD and ADD Children” by Betty B. Osman, and
	“Raise Your Child’s Social IQ” by Cathi Cohen.