The very best example of good intervention for executive functioning is a good kindergarten or first grade classroom, because those teachers are teaching kids how to be students; how do you operate in a classroom, how do you operate in a school building. And most of these kids with weak executive functions start to falter at the point at which they no longer have the pretty bright yellow folders with their name on the front that the teacher checks every day.
It’s when they have to independently organize themselves that they start having trouble. Now some kids even in that kindergarten or first grade classroom you see problems. The kids who sit down at their desks and despite the fact that we’re now way into spring, they still don’t initiate that morning routine or the kids who have the backpacks and the cubbies that are just so disheveled.
There are some kids who approach life haphazardly and there are others who are beautifully organized. And these kids usually declare themselves pretty early on in their development. So I work with the haphazard ones, mostly, but teachers, many of them, particularly teachers in early education are used to those kids because developmentally that’s appropriate at that stage.
