KIDS

Kids

LearningWorks for Kids is about finding fun ways for you to get better at setting goals, making good decisions, and being in charge of your effort and emotions. These skills, which are called executive functions, are really important for doing your best at school, keeping up with your chores, and getting along with other people. Some kids know about executive functions but don’t always use them when they should. LearningWorks helps you to see how you use a lot of executive functions in things such as playing video games or searching the Internet, and then how to make sure that you use them the best ways at home and school, and with your friends.

Instead of  having your parents and teachers on your case about things such as keeping your room clean, finding your homework, forgetting directions, or practicing an instrument, LearningWorks encourages them to help you connect the way you use executive function skills in games and other fun activities to your real world. This doesn’t mean that if you simply play some video games or instant message your friends, you will know how to use these skills. It means that you will need to be thinking, talking, and trying to apply the same skills that you might use in fun activities to some of the more boring and difficult areas of your life, such as making sure your homework is done or planning to complete your homework before you get on your cell phone to talk to your friend. 

One good thing is that executive function skills can be learned. While some people just seem to be better at remembering things or being organized, there are lots of ways how to perform these skills more effectively and consistently. For that to happen you need to do a few things, including:

a. deciding you want to get better with these skills;
b. learning more abut what these executive function skills are;
c. recognizing that effort and practice will take you better at them;
d. understanding that part of your job is to be thinking and talking about how you use these skills, so that you can become more aware of how to apply them across all
situations;
e. being willing to practice the skills that you use in your fun activities in some of the more boring and difficult parts of your life such as homework, chores, and in school.

LearningWorks gives you an opportunity to tell your parents, “Video games are good for me!” We encourage you to show your parents how an activity such as text messaging or instant messaging your friends helps you to think about your writing skills, organize your thoughts, and pay attention to the unique spelling that is a part of those systems. We want you to ask your parents to get involved in your use of digital technologies such as getting them to take on a character along with you on a massive multiplayer online game. We encourage you to show your parents how to organize a buddy list on your IM or their phone numbers on their cell phones. In each of these situations, you are using a number of different executive function skills. It is your job to be thinking about how you apply these skills, show them to someone else, and then become more aware about when and how to use them in other real-world situations.

We encourage kids to learn more about executive functions and their own strengths and weaknesses with these skills. Playing with our e-learning modules, taking a survey to understand your strongest and weakest executive skills, and then working with your parents and teachers to select games and technologies that will help you to practice and develop these skills is the next step. After that, LearningWorks recommends that you try a number of other suggested games and technologies or to find your own games, then identify where and how you are using executive functions in these games. We urge you to try to make a deal with your parents in which you ask permission to play a game in exchange for showing  them how you are using executive skills in the game playing. We also encourage you to join other kids who use our website and share information with us, so that you can help other kids find fun ways to learn these skills. 

Questionnaires and ways to share your own experiences can be found on the following links.  We want to know what works for you!

For those of you who want some more help in getting your parents to let you use your Play Station III, X-box 360, or Nintendo Wii, or not only to let you but also to encourage you to instant message your friends or check out your social networking site, we have put together a set of helpful hints that we call “Convincing Your Parents that Video Games Are Good for You.”