Here's a great link that was posted on facebook.
Check it out.
The only one that I will disagree with is that ADHD is underdiagnosed. I think it's just commonly misdiagnosed. Kids are diagnosed with ADHD who don't have it, but a lot of kids are being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and etc. I just think it comes down to a case where it's not the most easily understoond condition. I can agree that it's a hinderance in modern learning, but I still stand by my word that it's not a disorder. It's something we have to work through!
Enjoy the article!
Top Ten Myths about ADHD
Monday, August 29, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Cool lighting effects for $20-$50 a piece!!
Hey, just a couple of ideas I'm willing to share with you and your ministries.
Lighting. It's something that's either taken for granted or it's under-used. You would not believe how much lighting can change the entire atmosphere of a room. Let's talk about special lights. You know, the cool lamp in the room, the awesome centerpiece, but you don't need to break your budget to get some cool lighting fixtures!
1) Rope Lights.
These will become the most versatile set of lighting in your ministry. Rope lights are useful for EVERYTHING. But don't just slap them on a wall and call it cool. Okay, it grabs attention, but unless you do it right, it just looks sloppy.
Here is a cool trick I learned with Rope Lights!
FOAM NOODLES: These are the coolest thing since sliced bread. You can swim with them. Cut them in half and give them to a cabin full of ADHD boys and just let them beat the tar out of each other without injury then watch them be ready for a nap around 10am. Cut them into rings and play games. They are awesome.
A while back I was purchasing a bunch of foam noodles to put around my room. I would slice them straight down the middle and put them up like pipework in the room. A woman who helps out with our senior Pastor's company, "Laugh Your Way America" had stepped in and checked out what I was doing. She saw some rope lights I was going to throw out and then suggested, "What if you ran them through the noodles?"
Woah. Mind=blown. I didn't even think about it. So I had to figure out the best way to string them through because some ends caught on the noodle, but I figured it out. Plugged in the rope lights and the noodles glowed so bright!! So I strung more ropelights and more noodles and viola! Cool lighting.
Here's a picture of how they turned out.
My next project that I'm working on will utilize old Christmas Lights. I'm making a centerpiece for our game room.
Here's what I'm using:
Cube Wire Shelving
Chain Links
4 1' metal chains
Christmas Lights
You know those wire shelves that you piece together with plastic connectors? Place anything too heavy and the whole thing comes a tumblin down? Here's a better use that what they were made for!
I have a bunch of these squares lying around. I'm going to make a grid of 6x6 of these. Don't use the plastic connectors though. I will use 3 chain links to link them together. Then I'm going to do a 2nd layer that's about 2 chain links on top of that and grid it out to 5x5. Then same distance in links and 4x4 and so on until I have the last row of 1x1. Then you take your christmas lights and string them throughout the whole thing in a tangled mess. LED lights would be the best since they don't generate a lot of heat. When I'm done I'll have a sweet pyramid of these hanging from the ceiling. Now, I have a metal beam that runs across the center of my ceiling which I will be attaching these to. This whole thing could weight as much as 50lbs and you don't want that tearing anything down and landing on kids. That is also why I'm using chain links instead of the plastic connectors. I'll post pictures when I'm done.
Anyway. Just use your imagination. You can do some really cool things for cheap if you just take the time to use what is around you!
That is all for today! Enjoy!
-Eric Riskus
Lighting. It's something that's either taken for granted or it's under-used. You would not believe how much lighting can change the entire atmosphere of a room. Let's talk about special lights. You know, the cool lamp in the room, the awesome centerpiece, but you don't need to break your budget to get some cool lighting fixtures!
1) Rope Lights.
These will become the most versatile set of lighting in your ministry. Rope lights are useful for EVERYTHING. But don't just slap them on a wall and call it cool. Okay, it grabs attention, but unless you do it right, it just looks sloppy.
Here is a cool trick I learned with Rope Lights!
FOAM NOODLES: These are the coolest thing since sliced bread. You can swim with them. Cut them in half and give them to a cabin full of ADHD boys and just let them beat the tar out of each other without injury then watch them be ready for a nap around 10am. Cut them into rings and play games. They are awesome.
A while back I was purchasing a bunch of foam noodles to put around my room. I would slice them straight down the middle and put them up like pipework in the room. A woman who helps out with our senior Pastor's company, "Laugh Your Way America" had stepped in and checked out what I was doing. She saw some rope lights I was going to throw out and then suggested, "What if you ran them through the noodles?"
Woah. Mind=blown. I didn't even think about it. So I had to figure out the best way to string them through because some ends caught on the noodle, but I figured it out. Plugged in the rope lights and the noodles glowed so bright!! So I strung more ropelights and more noodles and viola! Cool lighting.
Here's a picture of how they turned out.
My next project that I'm working on will utilize old Christmas Lights. I'm making a centerpiece for our game room.
Here's what I'm using:
Cube Wire Shelving
Chain Links
4 1' metal chains
Christmas Lights
You know those wire shelves that you piece together with plastic connectors? Place anything too heavy and the whole thing comes a tumblin down? Here's a better use that what they were made for!
I have a bunch of these squares lying around. I'm going to make a grid of 6x6 of these. Don't use the plastic connectors though. I will use 3 chain links to link them together. Then I'm going to do a 2nd layer that's about 2 chain links on top of that and grid it out to 5x5. Then same distance in links and 4x4 and so on until I have the last row of 1x1. Then you take your christmas lights and string them throughout the whole thing in a tangled mess. LED lights would be the best since they don't generate a lot of heat. When I'm done I'll have a sweet pyramid of these hanging from the ceiling. Now, I have a metal beam that runs across the center of my ceiling which I will be attaching these to. This whole thing could weight as much as 50lbs and you don't want that tearing anything down and landing on kids. That is also why I'm using chain links instead of the plastic connectors. I'll post pictures when I'm done.
Anyway. Just use your imagination. You can do some really cool things for cheap if you just take the time to use what is around you!
That is all for today! Enjoy!
-Eric Riskus
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Tips and Secrets to Ministering to Children with ADHD
I would first like to disclaim that I don't have any kind of degree in children's psychology, however I do have my own life experiences and what I have documented and seen work with kids with ADHD.
To give a little back story, i was diagnosed with ADHD back in the 3rd grade. The doctors put me on Ritalin and there was definite improvement in my focus, but at the same time it kind of repressed who I was. But if I ever went off of my medication for the weekend when there was no school it would throw off the effects, so I ended up having to take Ritalin every day of the school year. No exceptions.
My mom would make sure that I took 20mg in the morning before school and then I would have to take another 10mg around 1:00 to make sure I can focus the rest of the day. However the issue was that I had to remember to take it! More often than not I wouldn't take it and my parents would get sent letters that I still had a full bottle of meds left.
One morning I had to hurry out of the house and didn't have time to eat breakfast, so my parents gave me some money to buy breakfast at school. I went to the cafeteria and they told me that there wasn't any breakfast left, so they let me have some Zingers, a chocolate frosted cake snack, instead.
Now all of this considered, when I would go to school, I would not be able to focus, I was full of energy, and when I got home I would crash and then not feel like doing my homework or getting anything done. The school would send letters home saying that, "Your child does not complete his homework on time." or "Your child is disrupting class in outbursts." or my favorite, "You need to take the time to work with your child on his focus and attention."
Does this sound like it's entirely the child or the parents' fault?
Back in 1993 ADHD was still a little unknown, so the first thing people tried to do was fight it, like it was some kind of curable disease. ADD and ADHD is not a disease.
And can I say this? It is NOT a learning disorder!
I'm going to start calling people who are blind AVD (Active Vision Disorder) and people in wheelchairs UWD (Upright Walking Disorder.) Okay, maybe not. I think people would get a little offended, but think about this.
The brain of those with ADHD is wired differently than those who don't have it.
Notice the brain on the left. It's of a child who does not have ADHD. The one on the right is of a child with ADHD.
The difference here is that those with ADHD are not stimulated enough. You'll see the decreased brain activity. The problem today is that we constantly try to FIGHT ADHD. Which you simply can't do. I guarantee that the ADHD will win. If you try to heavily medicate, you may win, but the child is now collateral damage. You suck out all the personality and what makes that child unique.
ADHD is not something that can be fought. I did not want to be stuck on meds for it my entire life. So when I was 13 I stopped taking my meds and my parents and I started to learn how to work with it. This is the premise of this blog post today.
We often try to fight ADHD with a few following practices.
1) Just try to focus!
Let's take little Eric in Chidren's Church. He's found a rubber band and starts playing with it in his hands, but the Pastor yells at him to put it away and listen to the message. There's nothing happening on stage for the next five minutes except the pastor is talking and wrapping up his message. Then at the end Eric has no clue what has just been said and goes home not learning a thing. Sure he paid attention for the first 2 minutes, but then the Pastor said something about a video game to tie into what he was wrapping up with, and Eric began thinking about the video games he was going to play at home, and what he was going to eat, and that he likes mac and cheese, but not as much as cheeseburgers, and maybe mom and dad will take him to McDonalds, never mind McDonalds, he wants Burger King, and then he remembers, oh! I have a report to do in school about the king of France, and the other day I learned something in french, and french fries sound good, and I want to go to McDonalds...why is everyone getting up and leaving?
Most people don't realize, but children with ADHD are excellent mental multi-taskers. That's why when we are working on something that's mindless like washing dishes, or putzing with playthings we are all aware of what's happening around us. There is one exception which is hyper-focusing. This is when we are working on something with our hands that we are truly interested in and then we tune everything else out, close off our minds and focus exclusively on what is in front of us right now. This happens when it's a project that we CHOOSE to do.
Physically, when we start a new task or idea, we get this great notion to start a brand new project, but we can easily get distracted and the common thing you find in anyone with ADHD is that there are a lot of unfinished projects because we start something new and leave the old one. (I'll talk about how to work around this effectively in a later post. Don't worry!)
Here's a tip. If a child in your ministry is doodling on a piece of paper while you are delivering simply a message, let him doodle. I can bet you $100 that he will have retained what you were talking about. Maybe not at that exact moment, but later at home he'll remember everything. We're funny like that. Our brains scatter information. So while it may not appear that we are listening, we really are.
2)Sit still!
ADHD has that one extra letter in there, the "H" which stands for "Hyperactivity." Rather than think of this as a disorder, let's think of it as attention deficit in high definition!
We are movers. We like to stay somewhat active. Think of it like this. ADHD kids are like bottles of baking soda and vinegar. If you put a cap on it, it's going to burp, and gas will release, and come out in little spurts. If you try to tighten the cap, the bottle is going to explode. If you take time to take the cap off, the pressure releases naturally.
If a child with ADHD is squirming in their seat, it's beneficial to give them something to do with their hands.
Here's an example.
A while back while I was volunteering under Pastor Keith Schommer, in Green Bay I was walking up and down the aisles, and there was a kid in the back who was making noise and being disruptive. The adults would simply walk by and press their finger to their lips and go, "shhh" as if it was somehow going to miraculously turn this kid into an attention machine. I went and got a piece of yarn and tied it into a circle knot. Nothing too big, but something he can slip over his hand. I then sat down next to him and gave him this piece of yarn while P.K. was delivering his message. This kid did not make a peep. Instead he was fiddling with the yarn and his attention was on that. Meanwhile during the service I would now and then point to the stage and he would look up, and pay attention. I turned the yarn into the distraction, but then I turned the stage into the distraction for the yarn.
This is an example of taking the cap off the bottle. The adults telling him to shhh was forcing the cap on the bottle, and his little outbursts was the cap loosely on the bottle.
The main point I'm trying to get across here is that you need to start learning how to work with kids who have ADHD instead of trying to surpress it. It's a battle you will never win. Your children will get frustrated, and not learn a thing.
Now one common thing I hear from a lot of teachers is, "If I let him play with that yarn, I need to let the other kids play with yarn too!" or "His piece of yarn is distracting the kids next to him."
I could easily turn that around! What if there's a kid with a leg brace in my children's ministry? Should I have him take it off simply because it's distracting other kids? Should I take it away because I'll have to give the other kids a leg brace too?
ADHD is a condition that requires tools and techniques to work around it. It's not a lifestyle choice, but it is a lifestyle none the less. We don't choose to have it. I can't stop my ADHD just so others can feel more comfortable. The minute I started learning to work with what I have, the sooner God was able to use me in the way he called me to be. God doesn't make mistakes so stop trying to fix them!
That being said, here's some ideas for you to share with your volunteers.
1) You should never have to handle these issues on stage. Your volunteers need to be trained to handle children with ADHD. Teach them what I wrote above and how to do it in the least distracting way as possible. A string of yarn is WAAY better than a slamming book!
2) There are things that are inexcuseable.
ADHD is not an excuse. I refuse to let my kids cause trouble simply because they have ADHD. If a kid keeps making outbursts you have to determine if the root is simply ADHD or if it is outright disrespect. If your child is doodling on his bulletin, then that's one thing. If he's writing on the walls it's something else!
3) This post is not about favoritism to ADHD kids.
You would think so, but it's not. Don't pick the ADHD kid to do something all the time because it will help ease the tension. It's not fair to the other kids. I did have to learn how to start controlling myself in public. And that's how I developed and learned about the mental multi tasking. Let them have something like a squeeze ball, but they shouldn't be favored and the other kids forced to work around him. We're all in this together and they have to learn that it's not all about them. These steps above are simply the tools to help your ADHD child learn and succeed in an environment around them.
I hope this makes some sense and gives you some great ideas on how to work with children who have ADHD. The most important rule is that you shouldn't fight ADHD, rather learn to work with it.
To give a little back story, i was diagnosed with ADHD back in the 3rd grade. The doctors put me on Ritalin and there was definite improvement in my focus, but at the same time it kind of repressed who I was. But if I ever went off of my medication for the weekend when there was no school it would throw off the effects, so I ended up having to take Ritalin every day of the school year. No exceptions.
My mom would make sure that I took 20mg in the morning before school and then I would have to take another 10mg around 1:00 to make sure I can focus the rest of the day. However the issue was that I had to remember to take it! More often than not I wouldn't take it and my parents would get sent letters that I still had a full bottle of meds left.
One morning I had to hurry out of the house and didn't have time to eat breakfast, so my parents gave me some money to buy breakfast at school. I went to the cafeteria and they told me that there wasn't any breakfast left, so they let me have some Zingers, a chocolate frosted cake snack, instead.
Now all of this considered, when I would go to school, I would not be able to focus, I was full of energy, and when I got home I would crash and then not feel like doing my homework or getting anything done. The school would send letters home saying that, "Your child does not complete his homework on time." or "Your child is disrupting class in outbursts." or my favorite, "You need to take the time to work with your child on his focus and attention."
Does this sound like it's entirely the child or the parents' fault?
Back in 1993 ADHD was still a little unknown, so the first thing people tried to do was fight it, like it was some kind of curable disease. ADD and ADHD is not a disease.
And can I say this? It is NOT a learning disorder!
I'm going to start calling people who are blind AVD (Active Vision Disorder) and people in wheelchairs UWD (Upright Walking Disorder.) Okay, maybe not. I think people would get a little offended, but think about this.
The brain of those with ADHD is wired differently than those who don't have it.
Notice the brain on the left. It's of a child who does not have ADHD. The one on the right is of a child with ADHD.
The difference here is that those with ADHD are not stimulated enough. You'll see the decreased brain activity. The problem today is that we constantly try to FIGHT ADHD. Which you simply can't do. I guarantee that the ADHD will win. If you try to heavily medicate, you may win, but the child is now collateral damage. You suck out all the personality and what makes that child unique.
ADHD is not something that can be fought. I did not want to be stuck on meds for it my entire life. So when I was 13 I stopped taking my meds and my parents and I started to learn how to work with it. This is the premise of this blog post today.
We often try to fight ADHD with a few following practices.
1) Just try to focus!
Let's take little Eric in Chidren's Church. He's found a rubber band and starts playing with it in his hands, but the Pastor yells at him to put it away and listen to the message. There's nothing happening on stage for the next five minutes except the pastor is talking and wrapping up his message. Then at the end Eric has no clue what has just been said and goes home not learning a thing. Sure he paid attention for the first 2 minutes, but then the Pastor said something about a video game to tie into what he was wrapping up with, and Eric began thinking about the video games he was going to play at home, and what he was going to eat, and that he likes mac and cheese, but not as much as cheeseburgers, and maybe mom and dad will take him to McDonalds, never mind McDonalds, he wants Burger King, and then he remembers, oh! I have a report to do in school about the king of France, and the other day I learned something in french, and french fries sound good, and I want to go to McDonalds...why is everyone getting up and leaving?
Most people don't realize, but children with ADHD are excellent mental multi-taskers. That's why when we are working on something that's mindless like washing dishes, or putzing with playthings we are all aware of what's happening around us. There is one exception which is hyper-focusing. This is when we are working on something with our hands that we are truly interested in and then we tune everything else out, close off our minds and focus exclusively on what is in front of us right now. This happens when it's a project that we CHOOSE to do.
Physically, when we start a new task or idea, we get this great notion to start a brand new project, but we can easily get distracted and the common thing you find in anyone with ADHD is that there are a lot of unfinished projects because we start something new and leave the old one. (I'll talk about how to work around this effectively in a later post. Don't worry!)
Here's a tip. If a child in your ministry is doodling on a piece of paper while you are delivering simply a message, let him doodle. I can bet you $100 that he will have retained what you were talking about. Maybe not at that exact moment, but later at home he'll remember everything. We're funny like that. Our brains scatter information. So while it may not appear that we are listening, we really are.
2)Sit still!
ADHD has that one extra letter in there, the "H" which stands for "Hyperactivity." Rather than think of this as a disorder, let's think of it as attention deficit in high definition!
We are movers. We like to stay somewhat active. Think of it like this. ADHD kids are like bottles of baking soda and vinegar. If you put a cap on it, it's going to burp, and gas will release, and come out in little spurts. If you try to tighten the cap, the bottle is going to explode. If you take time to take the cap off, the pressure releases naturally.
If a child with ADHD is squirming in their seat, it's beneficial to give them something to do with their hands.
Here's an example.
A while back while I was volunteering under Pastor Keith Schommer, in Green Bay I was walking up and down the aisles, and there was a kid in the back who was making noise and being disruptive. The adults would simply walk by and press their finger to their lips and go, "shhh" as if it was somehow going to miraculously turn this kid into an attention machine. I went and got a piece of yarn and tied it into a circle knot. Nothing too big, but something he can slip over his hand. I then sat down next to him and gave him this piece of yarn while P.K. was delivering his message. This kid did not make a peep. Instead he was fiddling with the yarn and his attention was on that. Meanwhile during the service I would now and then point to the stage and he would look up, and pay attention. I turned the yarn into the distraction, but then I turned the stage into the distraction for the yarn.
This is an example of taking the cap off the bottle. The adults telling him to shhh was forcing the cap on the bottle, and his little outbursts was the cap loosely on the bottle.
The main point I'm trying to get across here is that you need to start learning how to work with kids who have ADHD instead of trying to surpress it. It's a battle you will never win. Your children will get frustrated, and not learn a thing.
Now one common thing I hear from a lot of teachers is, "If I let him play with that yarn, I need to let the other kids play with yarn too!" or "His piece of yarn is distracting the kids next to him."
I could easily turn that around! What if there's a kid with a leg brace in my children's ministry? Should I have him take it off simply because it's distracting other kids? Should I take it away because I'll have to give the other kids a leg brace too?
ADHD is a condition that requires tools and techniques to work around it. It's not a lifestyle choice, but it is a lifestyle none the less. We don't choose to have it. I can't stop my ADHD just so others can feel more comfortable. The minute I started learning to work with what I have, the sooner God was able to use me in the way he called me to be. God doesn't make mistakes so stop trying to fix them!
That being said, here's some ideas for you to share with your volunteers.
1) You should never have to handle these issues on stage. Your volunteers need to be trained to handle children with ADHD. Teach them what I wrote above and how to do it in the least distracting way as possible. A string of yarn is WAAY better than a slamming book!
2) There are things that are inexcuseable.
ADHD is not an excuse. I refuse to let my kids cause trouble simply because they have ADHD. If a kid keeps making outbursts you have to determine if the root is simply ADHD or if it is outright disrespect. If your child is doodling on his bulletin, then that's one thing. If he's writing on the walls it's something else!
3) This post is not about favoritism to ADHD kids.
You would think so, but it's not. Don't pick the ADHD kid to do something all the time because it will help ease the tension. It's not fair to the other kids. I did have to learn how to start controlling myself in public. And that's how I developed and learned about the mental multi tasking. Let them have something like a squeeze ball, but they shouldn't be favored and the other kids forced to work around him. We're all in this together and they have to learn that it's not all about them. These steps above are simply the tools to help your ADHD child learn and succeed in an environment around them.
I hope this makes some sense and gives you some great ideas on how to work with children who have ADHD. The most important rule is that you shouldn't fight ADHD, rather learn to work with it.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
"Creationist Fail" Fail.
A recent video has come out depicting Christians or those who believe in God to be wrong again. But the video they use is pretty one sided and doesn’t make a lot of sense in fighting an argument about creationism vs. somehow it was always there.
Watch the video by clicking the title.
First off, it starts by saying that we are in a “Goldilocks Zone” Where if we were too close to the sun, we’d burn up and if we were too far away, we would freeze. The way this video speaks of it, it sounds like he believes that it’s in the bible that it was perfectly placed. The biggest part of this fad saying came from a Carmen music video in the 90’s that talked about the science behind it.
“Creationists can’t ever say it again.”
We never could say it to begin with! The bible does not say anywhere that “God placed the Earth within such a mass of the sun so that we wouldn’t burn up, or we wouldn’t freeze.” Simply put, God created the heavens and the Earth. The word “heavens” first off is not capitalized so it’s not a specific place. Look at the Hebrew word for heavens.
הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם (missing some of the Hebrew vowel markers…but that’s Arial for you.)
This word in English is, “ha·sha·ma·yim”
This word has a few multiple meanings, heaven or sky. That was the belief, in Hebrew, that it was the sky during the day, heavens at night. To keep with that,
You’ll find the same word used again in Genesis 2:4
4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.
And the word “heavens” was used in more than one translation of the bible, keeping it close to the original word, hashamayim.
That being said, you’ll hear the next part when the rocket flew into space it immediately found 1,235 planets. When God created the Earth, he created the heavens with it. Every star in the sky, the universe…basically the whole expansion beyond what you see past the sky or what the bible refers to as the “firmament” which is a different use of heaven (no ‘s.’) and is used to say, “sky.” The Hebrew word is שָׁמַ֫יִם
Or shamayim, which only refers to what, you see as the “sky”
So since the beginning we knew that there was more out there than just Earth. In fact the video says that 54 are in their own Goldilocks zones of their stars. 5 are the same size as the Earth. God created the heavens and the Earth. So it’s ignorant even for Christians to claim that God only created the Earth and it’s the only planet that can support life. No where did God say, “I will never create another rock like this one. No other rock will support life and if it does it’s where I’ll hide the mermaids and the unicorns.”
The video goes on and on about how it will only see a tiny fraction of space in the entire universe. Well by that definition so could the Jews. Except they didn’t have any fancy telescopes or shuttles or rockets or even a stinking pair of binoculars to tell that “oh. There are other planets like ours.”
They concluded that everything beyond what you could see was, “heavens”
Moving on…
“We’ve been trying to tell Creationists that this is the case, but they just didn’t listen.”
Really? Who did you talk to? The crazy lady with 300 cats holding a Bible and a shotgun? I’m pretty sure a TON of creationists would agree with me that God created the heavens and the Earth. Can I say that enough? That was the heavens and the Earth. No specific place. No specific chunk of space. Simply, “heavens”
And he goes on and on even more about how, “You think this was made just for you?” NO! Get off your high horse!
WE were created for God. THAT’S what the bible teaches. God put us here on Earth and created us to worship him. That’s what I believe and no one has been able to counter it in any way shape or form.
So remember. If you happen to watch this video, it does not disprove Creationism. It doesn’t prove it either. It’s just an angry individual stating fun facts about the universe.
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