As per research estimates, the attention span of a child is typically two to three minutes per year of their age. This means that a 10-year-old can hold attention towards something for around 20 to 30 minutes. This span is decreasing drastically with the advent of distracting technologies such as smartphones and tablets to browse social media and the internet. Growing children’s minds are designed to be curious and wander in search of new experiences. As a result, kids find it difficult to focus on one thing and concentrate on something for longer periods. It has been established that those who have an enhanced ability to focus and concentrate do well as compared to those who do not. Focus and concentration are necessary for excellence and success in any profession in any field in life. Hence, parents and teachers need to work on enhancing the children’s ability to focus and concentrate for longer periods without distraction.
Let’s look at five useful concentration activities that can help improve your kids’ focus levels.
Puzzles
Riddles and puzzles require extreme focus and concentration on the kids’ behalf to solve them. This makes them useful concentration activities. These puzzles come in different forms such as jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, picture puzzles, rubix cubes, etc. These puzzles could be useful activities to improve attention and concentration among children. Large jigsaw puzzles frequently require focusing and concentrating for a long period to be solved. Working on jigsaw puzzles can enhance the attention span of children. Picture puzzles where kids are supposed to find anomalies in a picture or find differences between two seemingly identical pictures are useful activities to improve attention and concentration. Children need to focus and pay attention to detail to crack these riddles. Such games and puzzles can be useful exercises to improve concentration in children.
Memory-based activities
Holding anything abstract in your memory requires an acute sense of focus and concentration. We all know how memorising tables, alphabets, spellings, or even definitions is an uphill task and requires a high degree of focus and concentration on behalf of the students. Various memory-based games can be considered useful activities to improve attention and concentration. These games typically begin by exposing the kids to a phenomenon for a short period, and then they are expected to recall the elements of the phenomenon they just experienced. Those who can recall better, tend to do well in such games. Children can be shown a set of items for a short period and then asked to recall all the items correctly. There are various story-based games and riddles wherein children are told a story and then are asked certain questions based on the story just told to them. To answer, children not only need to recall the details but also use their imagination to connect various elements and events in the story to decipher the answer to the riddles posed to them.
Balancing acts
Balancing objects requires extreme focus and concentration to drive bodily movements. This makes them useful concentration exercises for students. Whether it is balancing yourself on one leg, balancing a pencil on your finger, or a book on your head while walking, or a lemon in a spoon while holding the spoon in your mouth and running as fast as you can, or juggling 3-4 tennis balls and not letting them fall. All such activities enhance the sense of concentration and focus among kids. Jenga is another popular game amongst children which invokes a heightened sense of focus and concentration among the players. To proceed, focus and concentrate while strategically picking and removing the blocks extremely delicately ensuring the tower does not fall.
Concentration Exercises
There are some useful exercises to improve concentration which kids can do very easily without much effort involved. For e.g., Holding a pencil in our hands, focusing on the tip with both eyes while moving the pencil towards us. Engaging in meditation and positive imagery could also be useful exercises to improve concentration. The child can be asked to sit in a relaxed posture, with their eyes closed. Once they are in a relaxed state of mind, ask them to imagine a happy place. This happy place could be anything that gives them happiness. You can even ask them to describe this place to you. This act will calm their minds and imagination will enhance their ability to focus and concentrate.
Playing games
Video games are not all bad for children. Most of them are fast-paced where the child is competing against a fierce opponent. To level up or win such games, kids need to focus hard and concentrate. Gaming consoles of today are full of games such as Need for Speed which requires children to focus hard on manoeuvring their car across the twists and turns of the racing track to win the race. There are games which involve physical activity that require focus and concentration to succeed and do well. Focus-based games include hitting the bull’s eye with an arrow (archery) or with a dart (dartboard) or destroying the bowling pins with an accurate throw. These games directly test one’s ability to concentrate and could be useful concentration exercises for students. Cricket is an extremely popular game. In cricket, when facing a fast bowler, the batsman needs to be completely focused and concentrated on the ball while it traverses at great speed from the hands of the bowler and towards the batter. Then there are other indoor games such as Chess which require players to focus and concentrate hard on the moves of their opponent and plan their future moves.
At EuroSchool we work actively to expose children to activities to improve attention and concentration.
