A strong memory is an important component to helping your child build a solid foundation for learning in the classroom and beyond. Your child will be able to concentrate and understand school concepts better, perform well in exams, and achieve better grades if he or she has a strong memory. Like any skill, memory can be refined with practice.
Here are some ways to help improve your child’s memory power:
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1. Encourage Asking Questions
Understanding the subject is essential. By frequently asking questions, your child will develop a deeper understanding of the subject and improve their critical thinking skills. The first step your child needs to take before asking a question is to do some in-depth thinking about the concepts involved. Once they have a deeper understanding of the topic, remembering it will be second nature to them.
2. Encourage Active Learning
We all learn better when we are more active in discussions or activities. Taking Science as an example, students are more likely to be interested in what they are learning when they have discussions with their peers or conduct mini experiments in class. This also helps in improving their critical thinking and problem-solving skills as the activities would require them to think and apply concepts, which would help improve their memory.
3. Use Visual Aids
Visual aids may help your child to remember information better. Instead of wordy notes and worksheets, having a mind map with colours and images will help your child to remember better. Using visual aids can simplify the process of remembering concepts and make it easier to retrieve information when needed.
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4. Create Mind Maps
Mind map is a form of visual aid and a popular way of consolidating concepts among students. When drafting out a mind map, you are connecting the various ideas that you have and relating them to one another. This will help in connect multiple topics together, which will help your child to develop a deeper understanding of what they are learning.
5. Take a Fish Oil Supplement
Fish oils are rich in omega-3 fatty acids eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). These fatty acids are important for maintaining normal brain function and also in facilitating communication between brain cells. You do have to take them on a daily basis as once or twice is not going to be enough to show results.
6. Manage Stress
Studies have shown that when you are stressed, your body releases stress hormones called cortisol, which can greatly impair the brain’s memory process. Engage in activities that can help you relax when you are feeling stressed, as trying to remember things when you are stressed may aggravate the situation.
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7. Break Information into Smaller Chunks
Have you ever felt overwhelmed when confronted with a large amount of crucial information to remember? It would be simpler to break down that massive amount of knowledge into smaller bits, as this would aid in better recall. To make the information easier to absorb and understand, use headings, bullet points, annotations, and highlights. It would also help you to recall better later because your thoughts are more organised.
8. Use Keywords
Using keywords is actually a way to study smart and remember information better. Humans all have limited brain capacity and there is only so much we can remember. By remembering the keywords to certain concepts, the rest of the information that are related to the keywords would naturally come to mind. However, that would only work if you have read the information beforehand and understood them. This method would help your child to remember better and improve their memory power. After all, remembering one word is easier than remembering one paragraph.
9. Ask Your Child to Teach You
Conduct learning sessions and get your child to teach you the topic. By doing so, they would need to study beforehand and prepare their teaching materials. The process of preparation would help to put on their thinking caps while the teaching process would help them to put their thinking skills into action. This would make them feel enthusiastic about what they are learning, which would in turn help them to remember information better. Of course, you do need to check and make sure that what they taught you is correct, as the last thing we want is for them to be confident in teaching the wrong concepts.
All in all, it takes practice to improve memory skills. With the above-mentioned tips put into play, your child will find learning much interesting and develop a much sharper memory skill for their exams.
Memory work is important, but understanding the concepts is an important playing factor in helping your child to remember them as well.
This article has been written by AceTutors for theAsianparent.
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