WHAT IS HOCUS FOCUS?

As educators, the most important aspect of our work is to help children prepare for a bright and challenging future.  But if we don’t also teach our children how to deal with life’s difficulties, many simply won’t realize their potential.  And for those students who face additional challenges – LD, ADHD, SLD, NLD, Autism, or any number of other physical and/or psychosocial obstacles – our job as an educator may include finding strategies to move them into becoming a more competent learner.

Hocus Focus is a student-centered, experiential-based educational approach that utilizes the art of magic (magic tricks) in the context of empowering an empathetic, professional educator/student relationship with the fundamental goal of student growth and development.  It is a systematic approach by which students learn to focus and accomplish specific goals and objectives by learning magic tricks – simple tricks at first and then more complex tricks as they progress – and then exploring the benefits of each one.

Hocus Focus can be used along with a traditional academic curriculum and can encompass a variety of techniques and instructional strategies.  When employed by the schoolteacher, counselor, or therapist/clinician, the utilization of magic tricks may offer a unique and unequaled potential for both academic and personal/social development in a variety of classroom settings or programs.

Hocus Focus may provide techniques and strategies that are both interventions and accommodations.  Interventions are those strategies that are applied to enhance or strengthen skills, while, in most cases, accommodations are used to avoid putting pressure on the weak skill.  (Therapist’s Guide to Learning and Attention Disorders, Fine & Kotkin 2003).

Hocus Focus is designed to assist children and adolescents with learning disorders regardless of their specific strengths and/or weaknesses.  It has proven effective in increasing levels of student motivation and resiliency.

Hocus Focus is an organized educational strategy available to teachers that combines education with the arts that will produce positive effects on student achievement, engagement, and overall academic success.

WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT THIS CURRICULUM?

Hocus Focus is a comprehensive “special needs” curriculum available for use in schools or therapy sessions.  The course study was developed in collaboration with national experts, teachers, and therapists/clinicians.

The purpose of this curriculum is to provide teachers with a visual, exciting, and motivating way to allow students to safely explore skill levels, improve existing skills, and develop new ones.

It is presented in nine (9) teaching modules.  Lessons are designed to address the eight areas of neurodevelopmental function (Levine, 2002) using magic tricks to impact all three domains of educational activity – cognitive (mental skills), affective (growth in feelings or emotional areas), and psychomotor (manual dexterity and physical skills).  The final lesson is a “performance” day for students to demonstrate what they have learned.

These modules have been designed for maximum flexibility so that the program can be taught as a stand-alone unit or integrated into core curriculum such as math, arts, or language arts.

Most importantly, Hocus Focus is fun!  The activities combine education and imagination to help children improve their abilities in planning, sequencing, organizing tasks and movements, fine motor skills, gross motor function/coordination, concentration, memory skills, and much more!

More information will be available very soon on this project.  Thank you for visiting this website and I hope you'll check back often for updates.  For immediate information, please contact our office at 434-384-4740 or email us.