Boosting Memory and Learning in Your Child - Fundamentals
By Andrew Loh
Every parent in this world wants their children to do well in the school, study hard and get good grades by getting good marks. As children begin to formal schooling, their parents assist them to study alphabets and numbers by memorizing and reciting. Furthermore, they also help their children learn memorizing different sounds that all letters and words make. Memory and learning skills in young children is very rudimentary and basic. Young children make their first journey into the world of memory retention and learning when they are just one year old. In fact, all children need memory retention skills and techniques in order to succeed in their classrooms.
Boosting memory and learning in young and old children is a serious process that involves streamlining and sequencing their thinking process. It involves changing or transforming children's mental makeup. Memory in young children is a complex process. Memory in simple words is recalling information stored in the children's brain. To enhance memory, children must use and employ a number of methods and strategies that help them retain and recall tiny bits of information.
Memory in children can be in many forms. Memory can be short lived or it can be long term. However, there are two types of memories in humans:
Short term memory: Here, remembering needs the ability to store information just for a few minutes. Short term memory comes to your children' use when they want to recall information very quickly. However, short term memory may not help them while they study for their tests.
Long term memory: Here, remembering needs the capability to store information for longer durations, say days or even weeks. Experts believe that this memory is useful or beneficial memory, because of its immense practical use. In a typical classroom, your children will need to enhance and develop long term memory to succeed in the tests and exams. Long term memory can be very subjective and it can come from sub conscious mind. For example, elders can remember many things that happened in the past and during their young days. Long term money can be very productive or just academic. It can very beneficial or useless depending on the situation when you recall them.
You can even manipulate memory for practical purposes. Active working memory is the memory that will help your children use information recalled in a proactive and beneficial manner. Information recalled while answering a classroom test is always active and dynamic. As an analogy, you can take the example of a computer mother board that has two types of memories, RAM and ROM. Both of these memory types are highly active especially the random access memory that can store information just for a few microseconds. Here, the memory used for performing different computations is very active and dynamic.
In children, the process of memorization is a dynamic process that involves several chemical processes in the brain. Different centers in the brain can process, retain, store and manipulate dynamic bits of data or information. Those that are very important become active memory components and people can recall them even after a long time. Children' brain knows how to handle and manage large repositories of information; those bits that are highly essential for survival become active and permanent, while those that are useless are discarded instantly. However, data and information that are useless are still held in the remote corners of brain for future use. Many of these bits of information are in the sub conscious mind that itself is a huge database of tiny bits of information.
Memory and learning go hand in hand and in conjunction with each other. Without memory children will never learn. On the other hand, without learning, your children may find it very difficult to memorize lessons. Take the example of a child who is trying to copying spelling words from the classroom blackboard. To learn copying, your children must first remember the exact sequence of letters and they will need to recite and write them down without looking back the blackboard for checking the words. Just watch your children reciting words under their breath or even repeat them loudly to help memorizing the words and letters.
Learning and memorizing are mutual and reciprocating. In fact, children will need to learn, as they memorize and memorize as they learn. Helping your children boost memory and learning is an intricate art. Parents will need to know and understand the brain development process before attempting memory enhancing methods to enhance memory. Continue to read Boosting Memory and Learning in Your Child - Basic Methods
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