Classroom Activities for Students With ADHD: Teacher Guide

Say it is the third period, there are thirty people in the classroom and you are explaining fractions at the board. In one of the back rows a student has been tapping a pencil on the desk for three minutes, has gotten up twice to look for something, and the page of their notebook is blank. You don't want to punish them, but you don't want to lose the rest of the class either. In this situation most teachers are caught between two options: either warning constantly, or ignoring it and moving on.

There is a third way, and it does not need a separate activity program. Most of the time a small shift in the form of the lesson in a few places is enough. Below I wrote the practices that help a student with ADHD struggle less in class, with their durations and sample sentences. I am not a teacher. As an adult with ADHD I know the student side of school; the teacher side I know from what I have read and from what people doing the job tell me. For that reason I kept the tone not "you should do this" but "if it were me, I would try this."

What these suggestions rest on

There is one thing I want to separate from the start, because in the classroom time is short. The evidence for every suggestion is not equally strong.

The best-supported classroom interventions for students with ADHD are the behavioral ones: clear expectations, feedback given right away, noticing and reinforcing positive behavior, adapting the task. The review of classroom strategies by DuPaul and colleagues and the review of psychosocial treatments by Evans and colleagues point in this direction. The 2018 review by Daley and colleagues also describes the core of behavioral approaches, that is structure and immediate feedback, being used at school as well as at home.

For movement-based learning, giving responsibility and group work arrangements the situation is different. Some of these have a side that has been tested and measured in children with ADHD (small but interesting studies for movement), and some come from general education principles and the experience of teachers doing the job. In each section I will write which one we are in. There is no place where I can form the sentence "this practice raises the grade of a student with ADHD by this much."

First, place, order and a way out

Before the activities, the place where the student sits is decisive. The evidence for this is limited but the logic is sound: the fewer the things that distract, the more of the remaining attention stays on the lesson.

If it were me, I would seat the student near the teacher's desk and the board, but with their back to the window and the door. The very front row is embarrassing for some students, so it would be good to ask them. What works best is putting a calm and orderly friend next to the student. Seating another fidgety student next to a fidgety one often strains both.

The second thing is a way out for movement, tied to a rule. Defining a way out for movement does not mean loosening the class rule. You can agree on a signal with the student beforehand: when their hand hits the desk a second time or when they flip a card, they may stand at the back for a minute, drink their water and return, or take a pencil box to a corner of the room. If this rule is talked through beforehand there is no shame. If it is applied without being talked through, it looks like punishment.

You can keep the desk arrangement small too: only the materials needed for that lesson on the desk, the bag on the floor. The minutes the student spends on a lost pencil or an eraser that can't be found are a hidden loss that eats the first five minutes of the lesson. In the article on not being able to sit down to a lesson I explained why the first five minutes are so hard.

Putting movement inside the lesson

Using the student with ADHD's fidgeting rather than suppressing it is more productive. There are two separate claims here, and they need to be told apart.

The first is sitting actively. In the 2015 study by Sarver and colleagues, children with ADHD performed better on working memory tasks with increased movement. So fidgeting may, in some tasks, not distract attention but support it. These studies were done on a restricted type of task (working memory), so saying "let them fidget in every lesson" would be excessive. The details are in the article sitting actively.

The second is movement done before the lesson. In the 2013 study by Pontifex and colleagues, children with ADHD got better results on some cognitive tests and reading-arithmetic measures after a 20-minute moderate-intensity treadmill session. The study was small and single-session. The direction is interesting, but it is not solid enough to say "let's run for 20 minutes at the start of the lesson."

Based on these, you can try the following in the lesson. You can apply all of them to the whole class without singling out the student with ADHD.

Answer by standing up (1-2 minutes). Ask a multiple-choice question. Assign the corners of the room to A, B, C, D. Let the students walk to a corner according to their answer. Both movement and a quick check.

Going to the board to solve (3-5 minutes). Instead of sitting in their place listening to a problem, let the student come to the board and solve one step. Three students, three steps, one person each.

Gallery walk (10-15 minutes). Put four or five sheets of paper on the walls of the classroom. Let each sheet have a question or a concept. Let small groups go around and write a sentence on each sheet. This is a natural movement break in the middle of the lesson.

Standing work spot (optional throughout the lesson). A high bench or a wooden ledge in a corner of the room. Let any student who wants write standing there for a while. Keep this place open not just to the student with ADHD but to everyone in rotation.

Small hand tools. A squeeze ball, a rubber band stretched under the desk, a pencil cushion. Quiet things out of sight. The only condition: if the tool turns into a toy, it goes. This condition needs to be talked through with the student beforehand.

Also, if it is possible to go outside during a break between lessons, some of the ideas in the article outdoor activities suit the school yard.

Splitting the work into short tasks

This is one of the in-class adaptations with the strongest evidence. In the review by DuPaul and colleagues, task adaptation (reducing the amount of work, splitting it into pieces, giving feedback more often) was also a prominent strategy.

The logic is simple. A page of twenty questions is a job with no visible end for a student with ADHD. If you split the same twenty questions into four boxes, the end of each box gives them a visible finish. When five questions are done they get feedback, then they continue.

In practice you can do it like this:

• Instead of 20 questions, write four sections of five or have the page folded. Let the student show you when they finish a section. While you look and the others work, a 10-second confirmation is enough.
• Split a long piece of writing into three steps and write its own time at the head of each step: "1. Opening sentence (5 min). 2. Two examples (10 min). 3. Closing (5 min)." Writing this on the board is enough.
• Say beforehand what they will do at the end of the task. "When you finish, go to the reading corner or look at the next page." A student who finishes and is left idle disrupts someone else's lesson.
• Keep the time visible. Project a timer on the board or put an hourglass on the desk. "You have fifteen minutes" said aloud is not enough, because a student with time blindness cannot feel fifteen minutes.

Starting is a separate difficulty. Some students sit at the top of the notebook for a long time after the work is given; not from laziness, but because they don't know where to start. Instead of saying "start" to such a student, tell them the first move: "Open your notebook, write the date, read me the first question." This is a small spark that works in what is called task paralysis. Standing next to them for two minutes and seeing them start often makes them able to continue alone.

Giving a real responsibility

I do not know of a strong study measuring the effect of giving responsibility on children with ADHD. Here I rely on a general principle: feeling useful when you do a job changes the child's place in the class. Students with ADHD often hear "sit, be quiet, pay attention" all day long. Being authorized with a task breaks this tone.

Responsibilities that work have three features: they include movement, have a visible result and are short. Examples:

Responsibility	Duration	When it suits
Handing out notebooks or books	2-3 min	Start of the lesson
Starting the timer and saying "time is up"	Throughout the activity	In short task blocks
Erasing the board, writing the next page	2-3 min	Between lessons, at transitions
Taking the materials of the next activity	2 min	Before the transition
Watering the class plant	1-2 min	Once a day
Taking an announcement to another class	5 min	When needed

I have three warnings. First, do not use responsibility as a reward or punishment. The moment you say "you behaved well today, you can erase the board," the job turns into a bargain, and the student loses it on the day they need it most. Let responsibility stay fixed as a role. Likewise, for how a reward system works in the classroom, the framework in the reward system article can help.

Second, make the responsibility open to the class. If you tell a single student "this is your task," the others will see it as a privilege. Set up a weekly task list: let everyone take a different role in turn. For the student with ADHD you can take care that the role is an active one, but it does not stand out in this list.

Third, when they do the job, acknowledge it visibly, without exaggerating. "Thanks, the timing went well today" is enough. Saying in front of the class "look, did you see, he does it really well" puts the student in a different place in the eyes of others.

Roles and time in group work

Group work is a double-edged job for a student with ADHD. In an unstructured group they either get lost or take on all of the work. At university level I wrote about this in the article group assignments. In primary and middle school classes it is possible to see the same two extremes.

Here the evidence comes from two separate places. Peer tutoring in the classroom (students working in pairs and explaining to each other) has been researched in children with ADHD and appears in the review by DuPaul and colleagues as an approach with positive results reported. Role assignment in larger groups comes from general principles of cooperative learning; I do not know of clear evidence that it has been tried specifically with students with ADHD.

The arrangement I suggest is this:

Keep the group small. Pairs or threes. After four it becomes easy for a student with ADHD to get lost.

Give roles by card. A card for each student: reader, writer, timekeeper, materials manager. The roles rotate in each activity. The student knows the job on their own card, and the question "what will I do" is asked less.

Break up the time. If the group work is going to last thirty minutes, start with a two-minute "plan" round, work for twenty minutes, and write "who did what" in the last five. Pass by once in the middle as the teacher and give each group a one-sentence piece of feedback.

Do the pairing yourself. A group the students choose themselves often carries the risk for the student with ADHD of being chosen last. If you do the pairing, this risk disappears. You can find a suitable, patient partner for the student.

Make the output visible. Let each group write on a shared sheet or the board. This makes the contribution of the student with ADHD visible. Decisions made verbally and then forgotten are where group work gets stuck most often.

Softening transitions

The hardest moments for a student with ADHD are often not the middle of the lesson but the start, the end and the return from break. Moving from one task to another is a separate executive function job. In the article difficulty with transitions I wrote about the reason for this and its form in adults. The same logic applies to children and adolescents and has a concrete counterpart in the classroom.

Practices that make transitions easier are as follows:

A two-stage warning. "In five minutes we're packing up" and, with one minute left, "one minute." A warning said only once is often not enough for a student with ADHD. Support the spoken warning with a visual signal: dimming the light, writing the remaining time on the board, or a bell.

The same transition, the same order. Let students do the same thing every time they return from break: sit in your place, open your notebook, look at the first question on the board. The more fixed the routine, the fewer decisions the student makes. A "warm-up question" works for this: students answer the two-minute question on the board as they enter, and you take attendance.

A short movement during the transition. Moving from an active lesson to a calm one is hard. A three-minute stretch or deep breath can soften this transition. The details of calming tools are in the article calming activities.

The last five minutes of the lesson. This time is lost in most classrooms, because bags are packed before the bell rings. Turn the last five minutes into a fixed ritual: writing in one sentence "what I learned today," copying the homework from the board into the notebook, tidying the desk. Homework not being written down is one of the things most often lost for a student with ADHD; if you check the writing, something goes home.

A sample lesson plan

Putting it all together, a 40-minute lesson can look like this. It is a template; you adjust it to your own lesson.

Minutes	What is done	What it does for the student with ADHD
0-3	Warm-up question on the board at entry; student hands out notebooks	Routine, movement, task responsibility
3-10	Short explanation, three main ideas on the board	Short duration, visible structure
10-12	Answering by walking to corners	Movement break, quick check
12-25	Individual or paired work in two sections of five	Split task, feedback in each section
25-28	Short stretch or a standing answer game	Transition, releasing energy
28-36	Application in groups of three with role cards	Clear role, short duration
36-40	One sentence "what I learned today," writing the homework, packing up	Fixed closing, the homework going home

This plan does not have to be applied in every lesson. Trying movement in one lesson and splitting the task in another is entirely enough.

Not turning movement and warnings into punishment

Finally, let me touch on three things teachers do unintentionally that have heavy consequences for a student with ADHD.

Taking away recess. If the student loses their recess because they can't stay in place in the lesson, the next lesson goes even harder. Moving is a need for this student, not a reward. Suppressing the need for fresh air and movement with punishment backfires.

Warning in front of the class. A sentence like "up again? sit down" increases the student's shame and leads them to hide the next times they get up. Shame is a feeling these students often have at school; I wrote about it in the article ADHD at school and university as one of the things underlying grade fluctuation. Give the warning privately, short and concrete: saying "open your notebook" works more than saying "pay attention."

Tying behavior to character. Adjectives like "lazy," "messy," "careless" settle into the student with ADHD's thoughts about themselves. Often this student cannot do it, not because they don't want to. The problem may be that the task or the environment does not suit the student. This is not tolerance of behavior, it is looking in the right place.

The same principle applies when talking to the parent. Tell them not what the student can't do but what works in the class. I wrote how to prepare the meeting from the parent side in the article talking to the teacher. In the same meeting, for the teacher side, the practices in this article can be a concrete starting list. For the methods used when the student studies at home, the study article and the home activities article also show the home counterpart of the practices in the classroom.

What remains with me

I think what works best in the classroom is changing the lesson a little instead of trying to fix the student. This is both less tiring for the teacher and less shaming for the student. Rather than a person with ADHD hearing "pay attention" for years, offering them a lesson they can pay attention to is, I think, much fairer.

Second, don't try to do it all at once. In a class of thirty, starting seven practices at once is often dropped by the third week. If it were me, I would pick one: the transition warning or splitting the work. I would look after a month, and if it worked, add one. Small and sustainable is better than big and left half done.

Third, nothing in this article is treatment. Classroom order does not cure ADHD, it makes the student's day more manageable. If the student keeps struggling despite all the adaptations, the places to talk are the parent, the guidance service and the doctor. Don't see this as a failure. The classroom is only one part of the child's life; there is a limit to what a teacher can do, and knowing that limit is part of the job too.