Hurrah for the WatchMinder!

My daughter has ADD. She is a Russian orphan who spent the first 15 months of her life with very little human interaction until I went over and adopted her. During those first months, the two hemispheres of your brain are making connections and without stimuli, the connections aren't nearly as numerous. This is probably the cause of the ADD, but that's just my theory.

In any case, she and I have spent the last several years tracking down all of her mechanisms of failure at school and stamping them out one by one. For her, it has come down to a combination of a poor vocabulary and a failure to write down her test schedules. Up to now, most of her tests have seemed like pop quizzes as she's forgotten to write down the test schedule the teachers put up on the board. When she takes the tests, many of the questions are gibberish to her because she doesn't understand the words and hasn't studied.

We're working the vocab issue with 3x5 cards and she's nearly got that one licked. The WatchMinder and a written end-of-the-day list is solving the test problem. Here's the blurb from their website:

The WatchMinder2 is a programmable vibrating reminder watch that looks like a standard sports wristwatch - the watch vibrates and a reminder message discreetly appears!

Here's what the thing looks like.


It's wonderful. We created a little message that just says "LIST" and she came up with a list of things she needs to do at the end of each school day. The WatchMinder buzzes her arm about 10 minutes before the end of school and she knows to go through her list. Since the list includes "write down upcoming tests," there will be no more pop quizzes!

Hurray for the WatchMinder!

I had begun to despair of finding a solution to this problem. In the past, I had sworn off vacations for myself and spent all of my annual leave in dribs and drabs picking her up right as school let out to help her write this stuff down. It got harder and harder to do this, so we really needed to find a solution that she could do on her own. This looks like just the thing.

We're both very excited about her future in school now. Her grades have always fluctuated wildly - some tests were As and Bs, some tests were Fs. It all depended on whether or not she studied for them. She wants to do well and never complains about the extra work. She's taken to reading in a big way and has finally caught up with her peers there. This last step has just been killing us and we may have finally solved it.

Thanks, WatchMinder!