
Improving your Child's Memory - Basics
By Andrew Loh
Memory is a fascinating thing! Having good memory can help everyone
immensely, be it a child or a grown up adult. Having good memory is
essential to achieve success in both personal and professional life.
Memory is very critical for growing children, especially the school
going ones, who will need to perform better in their classroom.
However, some children struggle very hard to remember simplest
lessons and school timetables. The surprising thing with them is
that they can easily reproduce from their memories very obscure and
unheard things like the names of those hundreds of cartoon
characters. In fact, children are more adept at remembering
something that they feel is very important to them. Getting your
children to remember and recite what their teachers teach in the
classroom has been a challenge for most parents and teachers.
A child may be very smart and mentally agile both in classroom and
out of it. However, he or she still has to developing memory skills
to succeed in the classroom. Parents and teachers often find even
the most friendly teaching approach will not help some children to
remember simple instructions given just an hour ago. It is a
well-known fact our present-day education system relies heavily on
children reciting and reproducing lessons from their memory. Thus,
the big question here is how we can assist our children to
streamline and develop memory powers that can help them perform
better in the classroom.
Before we talk about memory in children, we should try to understand
the intricate relationship between memory and learning. Both these
terms are essential for the academic success of your children.
Academicians segregate memory into two distinctive types of entities
- long-term memory and working memory. All children need these
memory types, if they want them succeed in their classrooms.
Long-term memory is your child's innate ability to remember past
events, happenings, facts learnt before, by accessing the pool of
information stored in the brain. Long-term memory is essential for
success in schools and colleges. On the other hand, working memory
is your child's ability to latch on to a number of ideas in his or
her head simultaneously and later employ them for short periods.
Some examples are remembering some names heard over a telephone as
you search for a pen and piece of paper.
To succeed in a classroom, your children need to develop and possess
good working memory. Working memory can come in many forms. For
example, a common reading response in a classroom may involve a
child express his or her opinion by reproducing from a just written
sheet. The teacher may evaluate his or her child's memory by
checking the recitation word by word. Children participating in this
exercise may also need to rely on their long-term memory for issues
like using grammar and spelling.
In a practical sense, most children carry out this task almost
unconsciously and without their knowing. Working memory plays an
important role in schools and colleges. It helps your children stay
on their assigned tasks, remember lessons and instructions and later
complete the academic projects by using the available information.
In essence, your children must process available information as
working memory, before actually seaming it into long-term memory.
Working memory must work in an efficient manner before someone wants
to store all those crucial bits of information.
All children are born with a capacity to remember things and a basic
ability to acquire memory. However, using memory is an accomplished
skill. Your children can use it to some extent or lose it by a large
amount. Providing your children enough opportunities to exercise
memory skills is possibly the best method to train them.
Here are some basic methods to help your children develop memory
skills:
Rake up past events and discuss about them: When you discuss
about past events with your children, you are actually helping them
to develop memory skills. To help streamline the process, you may
need to actually elaborate and discuss about those events so that
you can initiate an interesting discussion. Let the discussion be
smooth and without any artificialities attached to it. Allow your
child to talk more and interrupt only when it is necessary. Examples
of some of the important key sentences are:
Playing memory games: Games like board games and card games
can help your child to use memory skills to play the games. Your
child will also use temporary memory skills to hone their skills.
These are just the two of the well-known memory skills enhancing
methods available for your children. You can use a number of other
methods to help your children improve their memory skills. Continue to read
Helping Your Children Develop Memory Skills!
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