Advanced Course: Executive Functioning Skills for Children & Adolescents: 50 Cognitive-Motor Activities to Improve Attention, Memory, Response Inhibition and Self-Regulation

CPD

Handouts

Speaker

Lynne Kenney, PsyD Related seminars and products

Move2Think, LLC

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Dr. Lynne Kenney is the nation’s leading pediatric psychologist in the development of classroom cognitive-physical activity programs for students grades K-8. She develops curriculum, programming, and activities to improve children’s cognition through coordinative cognitive-motor movement, executive function skill building strategies, and social-emotional learning. Her current educational program is CogniMoves®, a classroom cognitive-motor movement program, co-developed with Benjamin S. Bunney, MD, Former Chairman Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. CogniMoves® is designed to strengthen executive function skills in K-3 students.

Dr. Kenney is a pediatric psychologist on the language & cognition team at Wellington-Alexander Center for the Treatment of Dyslexia, Scottsdale, Arizona. She has advanced fellowship training in forensic psychology and developmental pediatric psychology from Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School and Harbor-UCLA/UCLA Medical School. As an international educator, researcher, and author, she is dedicated to improving the trajectory of children’s learning, particularly in high-need, under-resourced communities. Dr. Kenney’s books include Brain Primers, 2020 (Kuczala & Kenney); 70 Play Activities for Better thinking, Self-Regulation, Learning and Behavior (Kenney & Comizio, 2016); the Social-Emotional Literacy program, Bloom Your Room™; Musical Thinking™, and Bloom: 50 Things To Say, Think and Do with Anxious, Angry and Over-the-Top Kids (Kenney & Young, 2015). Her most recent endeavor is Cognitivities™, an original collection of portable mats that combine music, art, and movement developed with Fit and Fun Playscapes. Launched in 2024, this is the first Roll-Out Activities® mat of its kind, helping children with cognitive skills, executive function, and self-regulation in a calming and engaging way. In development, FlowMoves™ cognitive-motor movement cards for high-need communities and families to support co-regulation and self-regulation.

Since 1985, Dr. Kenney has worked as an educator in community services with national organizations including the Neurological Health Foundation, Head Start, Understood.org, HandsOn Phoenix, SparkPE, the First Nations in Canada, and Points of Light (Generation On). Dr. Kenney values working with Title I Schools.

 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. Lynne Kenney is the creator of CogniSuite & The Kinetic Classroom and the co-creator of 5n45. She is the co-owner of Move2Learn, LLC and has an employment relationship with Wellington-Alexander Center for the Treatment of Dyslexia. Dr. Kenney receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. Lynne Kenney has no relevant non-financial relationship to disclose.

Alternate Options

Objectives

1. Implement research-based activities educators, teachers and clinicians can use to improve thinking, self-regulation, learning and behavior.
2. Determine how to improve classroom cohesion and climate with physical activities that require thought engaging attention and memory.
3. Articulate the meaningful relationship between cognition and motor movement in learning and school achievement.
4. Integrate cognitively engaging physical activity in your classroom and practice with coordinative cognitive-motor activities.
5. Practice over 50 coaching and movement activities you can do to help children with ADHD, dyslexia, ODD, sensory processing challenges, dyspraxia, anxiety and behavioral issues.
6. Demonstrate how to enhance collaboration and cooperation in your classroom by helping students become “cognitive scientists” empowered to help their own learning.
7. Determine the role of tempo, rhythm and timing in cognition.
8. Design rhythmic calming strategies for on-the-spot behavior management.
9. Develop confidence in creating your own collaborative cognitive-motor work with your students.
10. Articulate how rhythmic “heavy” motor work can be more effective for dysregulated children then talking when a child is in distress.
11. Analyze the biological precursors to better executive functions, learning and behavior.
12. Practice cognitive-movement strategies to help children move out of the stress response into an alert state of calm.

Outline

Priming the Brain for Learning

• Impact of brain stimulation, stress, ACE’s and trauma on learning
• Create low-stress-high-connection learning environments
• Biological precursors to learning
• New preliteracy
• Executive function precursors
• 5 early predictors of academic success
• Create a calm classroom culture with kindness, respect & trust
• Importance of collaboration, agency and creativity in learning and behaviour

Foundational Motor Competencies that Proceed Learning

• Balance and weight shift
• Postural control for better learning
• Foundational movement patterns & sequences
• Types of patterns and elements
• How to build a movement sequence
• Activities
  • Balance activity
  • Teaching weight shift
  • Head, shoulders, hips & knees
  • Can everybody count
  • Initial brain primer sequences for attention, memory and self-control

Musical Thinking

• We are musical
• Using The Love Notes Measures are magic!
• “We Move on the Beat in Time Together”
• Sequence is the secret
• Activities
  • Musical thinking rhythm cards
  • Communicating need sets musically
  • Movin’ and Groovin’ movement mixes
  • Creating your own standing patterns

Thinking Interventions for Better Learning and Behavior

• Executive functions CAN be learned
• Build core executive functions for achievement
• Cognitive skills building process

“I am the Best Coach for My Brain” - Lessons for Students

• Teach children about their brains
• Make executive functions transparent
• “Cognitive Conversation”
• Activities
  • 8 brain lessons for students
  • Cognitive conversation prompts
  • The THINK Cards SAM Call and response cards

The “Cognitive Conversation” about Attention

• My Attention Engine
• Attention is more than one thing
• Attention cycle
• Types of attention
• Activities
  • Prompts and questions
  • Raise mindful awareness
  • My Attention Engine
  • Songs and chants
  • Interactive conversational practice

Seated Work For Better Attention

• Alert Attention
• 1-5 minute desk percussion activities
• Stadium effect
• Compositions & orchestras
• Activities
  • Table top tap
  • Repeat the beat
  • CogniTap
  • Paradiddles

Cognitive Engagement - Music, Piano & Drumming

• Role of music in learning
• Build musical skills through auditory channels
• Imagination in spatial drumming
• Meludia Method
• Taiko
• Activities
  • In Time (Advanced Brain Technologies) Solfege

Developing Your Own Patterns and Sequences

• Patterns
• Sequences
• Elements
• Sound and movement mixes
• Cueing
• Activities
  • You’re a conductor
  • We’re an orchestra

Language, Dyslexia, Reading and Learning

• What the research says about the precursors to reading
• Different types of dyslexia
• Role of speed of processing in reading
• Temporality, timing and prosody in reading
• Are rhymers really readers?
• Activities
  • Narrative language in daily life
  • Visual story-telling – sequencing and patterning in pictures
  • Lullabies, folk songs and rhyming songs
  • Circle pattern rhyming activities

Visual-Motor Language: Spotlight

• What is Spotlight and how was it developed?
• Collaboratively reading the visual-motor language
• Importance of cognitive cueing
• Use spotlight in various settings
• Activities
  • Initial instructions to the student(s)
  • Mirror and alternate
  • Planer, lateral and contralateral movements for learning
  • Create your own sequences
  • The one spotlight movement circle

Brain Primers (Mike Kuczala)

• Developmentally progressive cognitive engagement
• Increase cognitive-motor demands
• Engage creativity and collaboration
• Engage the reluctant learner
• Advanced mix and match elements, patterns and sequences
• Activities
  • Brain primers

The “Cognitive Conversation” about Memory

• Working, short-term, long-term, visual working, verbal (auditory) working memory
• Encode and retrieval
• Art, music and movement improve science
• Activities
  • File cabinet visual prompt
  • Retrieve math facts with Quick Rick
  • Encoding spelling with Slow Mo
  • Working memory enhancement strategies
  • Visual memory enhancement techniques

Improving Behavior with Cognitive-Motor Movement

The “Cognitive Conversation” about SelfControl (Response Inhibition) + Impulsivity

• Achieve better classroom cohesion, socialization and behaviour with responsive movement
• Difference between self-regulation and self-control
• Response inhibition and impulsivity
• Types of impulsivity (motor, verbal, cognitive)
• “Felt-Sense” of slowing down (self-control and selfregulation)
• 5 quick effective responses to dysregulated kids
• Between urge, action and behaviour
• Trauma, cognition, and dysinhibition
• Block repetitive anxious thoughts
• Activities
  • Think-Ups
  • Mary and Her Me Me Me’s!
  • Periwinkle and Pace

Self-Regulation: Heavy Work

• Push, pull and hold
• How does proprioceptive feedback calm the brain and body?
• What does the counting or cueing sound like?
• Activities
  • Successful transitions
  • Stationary holds with the Musical Thinking Rhythm cards
  • Large-motor heavy play
  • Hand play

Self-Regulation: Achieving an Alert State of Calm

• Self-regulation: emotional, cognitive, sensory/motor
• Self-regulation as energy management
• Use entrainment to reciprocally regulate 3,5,7,9 for calming in time
• Activities
  • Co-regulation
  • Retro Walking Dressage Patterns
  • Yoga patterns
  • Tai Chi patterns
  • Mirror writing
  • Self-monitoring worksheet

Attention, Memory and Inhibition

• How bean bags engage visual tracking
• How bean bags engage attention and memory
• Hand-eye patterns & sequences
• Activities
  • One and two person bean bag activities

Rhythm Ball for Calming

• One and two person ball activities
• Change cueing & counts for alerting and calming
• Activities
  • Co-regulating with one person
  • Back-to-back listening activity
  • Use music and metronomes

Target Audience

• PreK-12th Grade Educators
• Special Educators
• Psychologists
• School Psychologists
• Counselors
• Social Workers
• Occupational Therapists
• Speech-Language Pathologists
• Other Helping Professionals

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