Concentration is like a muscle that requires regular exercise to strengthen. All children can learn strategies and engage in practices that will help improve their ability to focus and sustain their attention. Over the next two weeks your child will be exploring the strategies he/she likes to use in our Learning Spaces, in order to maximise their own levels of focus.

We recognise the ability to concentrate and sustain attention on all kinds of tasks is crucially important because it helps students learn and improve, which leads to self-confidence and positive self-esteem. Concentration is a lot like mindfulness, a concept that has been receiving quite a bit of attention lately in psychology and in popular culture. Mindfulness is basically the ability to pay attention to one thing in the moment, and it has been shown to have innumerable mental health benefits, from increased happiness and stress management to improved academic and test performance. For mindfulness to work, you have to focus. Here are some examples of ways your children might build their concentration muscles: 

1. Set aside a reasonable amount of time for your child to practice focusing on a specific task. Young children (age 4-5) can usually concentrate for somewhere between 5 and 20 minutes, depending on the task. 

2. Do one thing at a time. Multi-tasking reduces concentration and diminishes our performance. In line with the concept of mindfulness, do one thing at a time in this one moment. 

3. Set aside time and space. Because multitasking impairs concentration, it’s important to reduce extraneous distractions. For example, work at a designated desk or table in a quiet room with the TV off, the phone in another room, and the laptop shut. 

4. Build in planned breaks. Children need to get up, move around, and do something different and not too taxing after spending some time concentrating. 

5. Practice belly breathing. Steady, diaphragmatic breathing slows our heart rate and clears our mind so we can concentrate. This is an important skill for kids to have when they’re confronted with challenging tasks, which can make them anxious and spike their heart rate. Anxiety leads to avoidance, the opposite of concentration. So finding ways to make tasks more approachable is important, and calming the body is one of those strategies. 

6. Break big tasks down into smaller, more manageable pieces. 

7. Practice observing things in the moment. You can play “I spy with my little eye…” and take turns making observations of various objects in the room, listen closely to the lyrics of a song together, or do some yoga poses and pay attention to how it feels in the body.