Exercise your memory muscles and improve your child’s memory
One of the most common complaints of parents whose children come to On Target Tuition is that their child just doesn’t retain the important maths and English facts that will make learning so much easier for them. Learning times tables especially seems to cause such difficulty for some children. No amount of rote learning makes any difference. They know them word-perfect one week but by the following week they have been totally erased from the memory. So wht is the best way to improve your child’s memory?
The memory works by creating a neural pathway to where the information is stored in the brain. So, for the brain to remember information correctly it needs to follow that same path back to where the information is stored. If your child has poor working memory then this can effect the way they learn, often making it difficult to retain maths facts and/or learn to read. There are things that we can do to help improve working memory.
Our memory acts just like a muscle and the more you exercise a muscle the better it will perform for you. Therefore if we want to improve our children’s memory then the best way to do this is to teach them how to exercise their memory muscles.
Here are 5 top tips to help your child improve their memory and retain facts
- Acrostic – Use the first letter of each word in a list to make a silly or memorable sentence. The classic example of this is learning spellings. BECAUSE – Big, Elephants, Can’t, Always, Understand, Small, Elephants.
- Rhymes and songs – These are especially useful when learning some of the more tricky times tables: 8 x 8 = 64 He ate and he ate and he sticks in the door, eight times eight is sixty-four. Eight times eight fell on the floor, pick it up it’s sixty four.
- 6 x 6 = 36 Six times six equals thirty six (It rhymes)Chicks, Chicks, dirty chicks – six times six is thirty six.
- 3 x 3 = 9 Swing from tree to tree on a vine, three times three is the number nine.
- 4 x 4 = 16 Tell this to the king and queen! Four times four is sixteen.
- 6 x 8 = 48 Learn it now and don’t be late! Six times eight is forty eight.
- 7 x 8 = 56 Say this when you’re in a fix. Seven times eight is fifty six.
- Images – This is useful when trying to remember dry information. Have your child make up a story of or image around the formula, spelling or meaning they are trying to remember. I find this technique works very well when trying to remember how to spell tricky words. I tell the child we are going to draw a word rather than spell it. For more examples visit iseeispellilearn.com
- Mind mapping – This is great way to:
- Get information in and out of your brain.
- Study and revise quickly.
- Take notes that doesn’t bore you to tears.
- Generate ideas and plan essays and projects.
- Talking and Listening – Encourage your child to discuss the thing they are trying to remember with you or another family member. Set them a challenge to see how much they can remember the first time and then go back to the notes and check for things they have left out. Have them read and study again before talking you through it once more. Repeat this process until they are able to remember all of the information.
Do you have any memory exercises? Please feel free to share in the comments below.