Executive Function Support

We help children and adolescents build strong, executive function skills essential for effective, efficient, and independent learning

We Teach the Building Blocks for Academic Success

At Red Oak, we teach children and adolescents functional skills and systems for managing and completing daily tasks, school work, writing assignments, and test preparation. Under our teachers’ scaffolded coaching, our students develop individualized systems and build habits and routines to better plan, initiate, and prioritize tasks, as well as self-monitor and manage time.

Our lessons are tailored to an individual’s age, academic demands, learning style and needs, and benefit children and adolescents with or without an identified deficit in executive functions.

Executive functions are brain-based skills that help us manage ourselves to complete tasks. Executive functions skills can be broken down as follows:

The ability to manage emotions to control and direct behaviour.
The ability to manage attention- to attend to a situation or task despite fatigue, boredom or distraction and shift focus as necessary without losing sight of the task at hand.
Being able to revise plans or thinking patterns in the face of new information or setbacks – being adaptable in the face of change.
The capacity to think before you act, or to resist the urge to say or do something in the moment.
The ability to create a roadmap to complete a task. Planning also incorporates prioritizing and decision-making.
The ability to design and maintain strategies and systems for keeping track of belongings and information.
The capacity to estimate time accurately, how to allocate it, and how to stay within time limits and prioritize deadlines.
Holding information in mind while performing multi-step tasks. Drawing on past experience and applying it to current and future situations.
Self-awareness and self-understanding – essentially the ability to “think about one’s thinking.”
The ability to begin a task in a timely manner, without excessive procrastination.
The capacity to follow through on goals and responsibilities without being put off by other demands or competing interests.