Ignoring Distractions

Over the past week, your child has been learning how to pay attention and ignore distractions. We have worked on paying attention to someone or something while ignoring a distraction.

Remaining focused while resisting distractions is an important emotion-management skill. Some children may worry about ignoring their close friends. It is important to let them know that there are ways to pay attention and keep a close friendship at the same time.
In each classroom, we divided the class into two teams and sang Row, Row, Row Your Boat in a round. The children tried to pay attention to their song leader and ignore the other group who was singing the same song but on a different verse of the song. The children have also practiced various ways to let a friend know they cannot pay attention to them right now (e.g. using their sign for “stop”, ignoring, saying “tell me later”, or moving away from the friend who is distracting them).

The children have learned that they may be in trouble if they ignore a grown-up who is talking to them or ignore a friend because they want to exclude them from playing. Ignoring distractions is a difficult skill to master, even for
adults. Again, be patient with your young child. It is hard to pay attention all the time and even harder to ignore a particularly noisy or large distraction.