Life skills basics #5 Sitting Skills

As a person who works with children with learning differences, I often need to teach a child some sitting skills. A child needs to learn to sit in various situations.  Many times it takes a number of skills that are chained together for a child to sit appropriately.  What are some of these?

1. Sitting:  How to do it?  A child needs to know exactly where he is to sit and any behavior expectations.  An example of this is:  everyone in our class should sit on a yellow sticker on the carpet.  Each student should stay on his spot until the timer rings after the story.  Sit on your bottom with your legs criss-cross applesauce.  Do not lie down on the carpet.  Your eyes should be looking at the teacher.

2.  If the child is going to go to an appointment, he needs some sitting rules.  There will be general rules for sitting in a public place.  Some specific rules may be needed for the specific place such as the pediatrician’s waiting room or the hair salon.  There is also training that is needed to teach the child about waiting and patience.  These are social/emotional skills that are related but different from just sitting at the table or at circle time.  It may be helpful to go over expectations ahead of time.  A bag of toys and/or snacks might be taken.  A structure may be used where a new snack or toy is allowed after a certain amount of time.  As our children were growing up, we often took them to baseball games.  At the 4^th inning and the 7^th inning there were certain snacks purchased.  This helped our children learn to watch the game and not ask for snacks all through the game.

These are just a few ideas to get you started teaching your child how to sit appropriately in a variety of settings.