One in seven children in the US are diagnosed with a developmental disability. The challenge for you, as a parent, is to help your child develop a healthy self-concept, build their self-esteem, and develop the skills they need to lead a productive life.
Empowering your children to feel good about themselves and their accomplishments can increase their motivation to try harder, take more risks, build their self-confidence, and help them develop 21st century skills.
In several recent research projects, teachers who used the Hocus Focus™ program were able to see improvements in a child’s:
- Ability to follow multi-step directions, concentration, and memory skills.
- Self-determination skills and self-esteem.
- Motivation as well as on-task and participation behaviors.
- Leadership and socialization skills.
- Positive peer relationships, peer mentoring, and peer collaboration.
- Positive impact on behavior.
Children are constantly building neural pathways when they play, investigate, figure things out, and seek new sensations. Learning magic appeals to those inquisitive qualities. The more they try and see and hear, the stronger those pathways get until activities that were once challenging are done smoothly, efficiently, competently, and with a great deal of satisfaction.
Magic tricks can help your child visualize, to concentrate intensely on HOW things are done. Learning to perform magic tricks offers a creative and intriguing way to stimulate their senses – touch, sight, and hearing.
One of the most important factors for achieving success for all children is to engage them in the creative process that involves the three ways children learn: learning by seeing (visual), learning by hearing (aural), and learning by doing (kinesthetic).
Allowing your child to learn simple magic tricks is a powerful way to draw on these three learning principles allowing him/her to learn facts and concepts he/she can see, touch, manipulate, and talk about.
AUTISM AND MAGIC TRICKS
Hocus Focus™ also addresses some of the challenges that High Functioning Autism students face – challenges in behavior, social cognition, linguistics, motor coordinator, and sensory abilities.
Learning magic tricks can:
- Encourage the student to be sociable, flexible, and cooperative when playing and/or studying with other children.
- Help the student recognize and implement the codes of social conduct, including the unwritten social rules and expectations of behavior that we all seem to know, but were never taught (the hidden curriculum).
- Encourage the student to have meaningful conversation, recognize and respond to facial expressions, and improve the understanding and expression of emotion.
- Encourage the student to understand different perspectives and the thoughts and feelings of others.
- Provide positive social experiences.
- Educate the student on the value of listening, giving and receiving compliments, giving appropriate criticism, and acknowledging they are “wrong” and learning from mistakes.
- Improve the student’s gross and fine motor skills.
Most importantly, Hocus Focus™ is fun!