How Halloween Can Help Children Build Executive Functioning Skills by Dr. Emily Levy, Founder and Director, EBL Coaching – MotherhoodLater.com

How Halloween Can Help Children Build Executive Functioning Skills by Dr. Emily Levy, Founder and Director, EBL Coaching

Halloween is filled with costumes, candy, decorations, and trick-or-treating. Yet it also offers children opportunities to practice important executive functioning skills.

Executive functioning skills help children plan, organize, manage their time, remember information, make decisions, and regulate their behavior. These skills are important for everyday activities such as completing homework, following routines, getting ready for school, and managing responsibilities. Many children struggle with executive functioning, and these challenges can be particularly noticeable in children with ADHD and learning disabilities.

Because executive functioning skills develop through practice, everyday activities can provide valuable opportunities to strengthen them. Halloween offers many ways to practice planning, organization, time management, working memory, self-control, and reflection.

Try the ideas below with your child.

Plan a Halloween Costume

Selecting and creating a Halloween costume involves a lot of executive functioning skills!

Rather than handling all the details when it comes to your child’s costume, encourage them to play a role in the planning process. Start by asking them questions like:

• What do you want to dress up as?
• What will you need to create your costume?
• Which items do you already have?
• What do you need to buy or make?
• When will you need to have everything ready?

Young children can create a visual checklist to help them with this planning, while older children can make a written list with corresponding deadlines. For example, a young child might create a visual checklist that has pictures of their costume, a trick-or-treat bag, a flashlight, and a jacket. They should check off each item once it’s done. An older child might write out each step, like choosing a costume, ordering supplies, and putting everything together, then add a corresponding complete-by date next to each item on the checklist.

This exercise can help your child practice planning, organization, prioritization, and task initiation. It also teaches them how to break down a larger task into smaller, more manageable steps, key components of executive functioning!

Practice Time Management

Halloween offers a fun opportunity for children to practice estimating how long different tasks will take and then comparing their estimates with the actual time needed to complete them.

Before they get ready for Halloween, ask your child how long they think each step will take. For example, they might estimate:

• 15 minutes to put on their costume
• 12 minutes for makeup or accessories
• 5 minutes to gather their trick-or-treating bucket and supplies

Once done, they should note how long these tasks took them to complete and compare their estimated times with the actual times.

Children who struggle with executive functioning often have trouble accurately measuring the passage of time. By practicing time estimation during a fun activity like getting ready for Halloween, you can help your child gain a better grasp of how long tasks take to complete.

You can also carry this strategy over to homework by asking your child how long they think an assignment will take to complete and then comparing the estimate to the actual time it took.

Use Trick-or-Treating to Strengthen Working Memory

Working memory is the ability to hold information in one’s mind while using it. Children utilize their working memories when they follow multi-step directions, solve math problems, work on writing tasks, and complete classroom assignments.

Before your child leaves the house to go trick-or-treating, give them a list of items to remember to bring, like their trick-or-treat bag, flashlight, jacket, and a water bottle.

Ask your child to repeat the list, visualize the items, or write down a list of the items rather than just trying to remember them.

You can also practice working memory during trick-or-treating by asking your child to remember which houses and streets they have already visited and what the plan is for the path going forward.

Remember to keep it fun! The idea is not to make Halloween a structured academic experience, but to find small opportunities to let your child practice remembering and managing information on their own.

Use Candy Sorting to Practice Organization

Organization is a central component of executive functioning. After trick-or-treating, your child can practice their organizational skills by sorting their candy.

They can dump their candy out on a table or the floor, either alone or with a friend or sibling, and organize their candy by:

• Type
• Size
• Chocolate versus non-chocolate
• Favorites versus items they want to trade
• Candy they want to eat now versus save for later

For younger children, sorting offers a concrete way to practice categorizing items. Older children can develop their own organizational system (instead of a system you choose) and explain why they chose it.

This same thinking process applies to organizing a backpack, binder, folder, desk, or digital files. Your child can learn to group similar items together and create systems that help make their materials easier to find.

Develop Self-Control and Decision-Making

A giant pumpkin filled with Halloween candy can provide a natural opportunity to practice self-control and decision-making!

Instead of creating all the candy eating rules and passing them onto your child, involve your child in developing a reasonable plan for their candy consumption. For example, you might decide together how much candy they can eat that evening, how the rest will be stored, and when they might have some of the remaining candy (or donate it).

This approach gives children an opportunity to practice delayed gratification, making wise decisions, and self-monitoring.

Practicing these skills can help children learn to resist distractions during homework, wait until it’s their turn, or complete an assignment before moving on to an activity they enjoy.

Plan a Halloween Activity from Start to Finish

To further work on executive functioning skills, plan a challenge for your child! To do so, let your child plan a Halloween activity.

While it depends on their age, some activities they can plan include:

• A pumpkin-carving night
• A Halloween movie night
• A Halloween party
• A Halloween craft
• A baking project

Once your child has identified the activity they want to plan, help them break it into steps. Which materials will they need?  How much will each item cost? When should each step be completed? What needs to happen first, second, third, etc.?

Give your child support and guidance without taking over the planning process. The idea is to provide your child with the opportunity to manage a multi-step task from start to finish.

Reflect After Halloween

Reflection is an important part of executive functioning development.

After Halloween, spend some time talking to your child about how things went. Ask them questions like:

• What went well?
• What was harder than you expected?
• Did anything take longer than you thought?
• Did anything take less time than you thought?
• Did you forget anything?
• Would you do anything differently next time?

These types of questions can help your child develop metacognition, which is the ability to reflect on their own thinking and learning.

Metacognitive skills play an important role in school. When a student can recognize that they waited too long to start an assignment or that they learn information better when they write it down or dictate it out loud, they can begin to make better choices and approach schoolwork more independently.

Closing Thoughts

Many children struggle with executive functioning skills, including planning, organization, time management, task initiation, working memory, and self-regulation. With these Halloween activities, you can help your child develop stronger executive functioning skills and become more confident and successful in school.

EBL Coaching specializes in one-on-one in person and virtual tutoring for students in grades pre-K-12 with specialized learning needs. They use research-based, multi-sensory techniques, including the Orton Gillingham method, to develop students’ reading, writing, math, note taking, test taking, and executive functioning skills. Each student is evaluated and then receives an individualized learning plan to address their specific academic needs. Learn more at http://www.eblcoaching.com/. Dr. Emily Levy, Founder & Director, is happy to hear from anyone who is in need for their child. You may reach her thru her website, and mention you heard of her thru MotherhoodLater.