Mpower Executive Skills

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/parent-workshop-executive-functioning-skills-and-strategies-for-success-tickets-375424634187

“Join Executive Function expert Wendy M. Craven, from Beyond BookSmart/WorkSmart Coaching, and Meghan Jensen with Mpower Executive Function Skills Corp. tonight for an informative session with tips on how to help your child thrive and be successful.

Understand why students struggle and learn how to reduce friction with your child. Learn strategies for self-regulation, problem solving, task initiation, and time management that will help to create balance in your child’s schedule, manage impulses, distractions, and emotions. There will be time allowed at the end for questions.”

Event hosted by the Chicago Autism Network

Meet Humby- the Mpower pup! 🐾 Every day that we take care of her, we use our executive functioning skills.

Are you trying to work on your child’s executive function skill development at home? Caring for animals is a GREAT place to start!

1. Time management: Create a schedule. Create a daily checklist that your child can cross off after each care task has been completed (psst… set alarms too 😉)!

2. Empathy: Teaching our children to care for a living being other than themselves is teaching them empathy. Empathy is a learned behavior, therefore establishing this practice has been proven to help build social skills and connections with others.
3. Anxiety & stress management: Tactile events such as petting a dog have been scientifically proven to reduce cortisol levels. The hormone cortisol, is generally associated with stress.
4. Planning: Sit down with your child to plan out the dogs schedule for the week, and how it works with theirs.
5. Prioritization: Once you have planned the care-taking schedule, you can prioritize rewards! Did they feed and take the dog out already? AWESOME- now they can watch 15 minutes of TV.
6. Following directions: Learning to follow a task list is not only a skill for chores, it is an academic skill, a job skill, and a life-long skill (how else would we learn to put together furniture from Ikea 😅?)
7. Communication Skills: Think about how we communicate in today’s world. We cross off our checklist to tell ourselves we’ve completed something, we tell our bosses when we’ve completed a project assigned to us, and we turn in our homework when we’ve finished it. Teaching children to cross things off on the task list, notify you, and tell the dog “good job” for going potty or finishing their food, are all positive forms of communication.