Memory

During these times that we find ourselves in, we know that without a doubt, a good memory is a fundamental necessity: not only for learning, but also for preparing us for day to day living. That's why, as parents, stimulating the memory of our children starting at an early age should be an important parent-child activity. But how can we do it?

Specialists in this area believe that there are three important stages of how memory is developed in children: the Sensorimotor Stage (birth to two years), the Preoperational stage (two to six) and The Concrete Operational Stage (seven to eleven). Each one of these stages requires different stimuli that are quite easy to find and to use.

During the first stage, we can use construction games, matching games and all kinds of puzzles. All of these things are easily accessible. Probably the most important thing we can do as parents regarding this stage would be finding the time to play with our infant on a daily basis.

During the second stage of memory development, toddlers begin to play with and incorporate more verbal elements. One simple exercise that we can do during this period would be to tell our children a story in different chapters in which our toddler is the protagonist. Each day we can begin a new chapter and our child can remind us of where we left off in the story while also giving us a refresher of the story. At this age, it is also an excellent moment to introduce them to games like checkers, chess and any other game that requires memory skills.

In the third stage of development we should employ more "mature" resources like providing them with interesting reading material and talk to them about what they have read (here any kind of reading material is ok to use, be it a magazine, comic book or short story). Watching movies together and talking about them afterwards is also an interesting exercise.

Today, there are plenty of resources and materials available to us to use with our children. With the boom in tablets and other electronics there are apps, computer games and console games that are designed with the purpose of stimulating the memory of children. But, keep in mind to do a little research yourself beforehand (parenting internet forums and parenting books and magazines are a good source of information) as to which programs are better and which ones have been developed and recommended by specialists. You will be surprised how much is available online and offline and, best of all, plenty of it is free.


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