How to Help Children with ADHD to Organize their Thoughts and Ideas

Children with ADHD often have difficulty organizing their thoughts and ideas, which arguably may lead to them “getting stuck” in terms of articulating their ideas. In fact, this difficulty in terms of organizing their thoughts may lead to their speaking in sentences that are unrelated in topic to each other. How do people with whom these children are speaking respond to this type of disorganized conversation?

They invariably become annoyed because as much as they try, it is very difficult to maintain a conversation with someone who jumps from topic to topic. So, what can you do to help your child to speak in a more organized way?

In consideration that it is likely that he cannot discriminate whether or not his thoughts and statements are organized, it might be a good idea to write down his statements on small pieces of paper for him.  Read each sentence to him aloud. 

Then, tell him to read the sentences aloud to you. Ask him to organize the sentences in chronological order, i.e., which one should be said first, second, third, etc. As he is reading each sentence, ask him if each sentence should follow the one before it in terms of their meaning.

If you determine that his organization of the sentences is not in a chronologically correct order, have him read one sentence aloud at a time and ask him if the sentence that follows is in the correct chronological order.

If he senses that a sentence is out of order, tell him to move that sentence on the piece of paper that is written on around until he is satisfied that it correctly follows the one before it. Then, have him read those sentences aloud again to determine if they are finally organized in the correct chronological order. Try this method and let me know if it works.