Let them concentrate on one thing at a time Try not to split their attention — for example, children are often asked to follow a text while the teacher reads it aloud, which can overload their brain. Avoid unnecessary clutter Livening up a worksheet with pictures or different fonts may seem a good way of appealing to children, but too much extraneous information on a page is likely to overload their working memory and prevent them taking in what they really need to.
Sticking to three points or instructions at a time, and backing it up with a written list or summary, will make it more memorable. Use visuals A list of the parts of a violin, for example, is more meaningful if a child is given a labelled diagram rather than the names in isolation. Use resources to support new information One of the goals of any teacher is to move a pupil from being a novice in any particular curriculum area to being an expert. Practise, repeat and recall Practice makes perfect, as the saying goes, and it certainly applies to making information stick.
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Memory aids for kids. Concentration exercises for primary school children. Is your child a visual learner? Typical observations over time might be triggered by these types of questions: What happens to a seed when it germinates?
What happens to the ice cube in your hand? What happens to the sun over the course of a day? What happens to the caterpillar when it moves? What happens to the flowers on the plant? Pattern-seeking questions might include: Do birds feed at different times of the day? Which flowers do bees prefer? Do all apples have the same number of seeds? Do we all have the same size hands? Where does the grass grow in our playground? Identifying and classifying Human beings, especially children, love to label and group things, and this type of investigation is rooted in making sense of how the world is organised and differentiated through various features and characteristics.
Identifying and classifying questions might be: What types of flowers did we collect? What do different animals eat? How can we sort the clothes in the play corner? What types of trees are in our playground? Do we have different types of teeth? Do all living things have four legs? Here are some typical research questions: Where do elephants live in the word?
How do we know how old a tree is? What is the most common spider in the UK? How are plastics made? Subject: Science Date Posted: 16 January What makes these memories even stronger is if their recovery arrives out of the blue, in the middle of learning about something else.
For example, in the middle of a sequence of lessons about fractions, give pupils a few subtraction questions to work on. Solution: frequent low stakes quizzes at spaced out intervals that get children to try and retrieve what they have previously learned. Memories fade with time if they are not used. Their memories will be starting to fade.
Memories might be fading but they are not gone forever. With a bit of prompting, they will be reawakened. It is very unlikely that you will need to reteach the concepts in the same detail as when they were first learned. Expect to have to reanimate faded memories from previous year group content.
Plan with the view that forgetting stuff in inevitable, and it ultimately results in stronger memories. Solution: plan deliberately to revise previous learning.
It will come back quickly. The goal of learning is that concepts are securely stored in the long-term memory. They must also be in a form where they can be used flexibly to solve all sorts of different problems; this is known as declarative memory or explicit memory. Understanding how this declarative memory functions and the way the brain learns can help us plan for this inevitable eventuality. Episodic memory is the autobiographical part of our memory that remembers the times, places and emotions that occur during events and experiences.
In the episodic memory, the sensory data — what a child saw, heard and possibly smelt during a lesson — alongside their emotions, become part of the learning. So, children will find it easier to remember something if they are sitting at the same desk in the same class with the same teacher, as this familiar backdrop is part of their memory alongside whatever it is they are learning.
This type of memory that is not so context-dependent and is the final destination on our learning journey. Once a concept has been stored in the semantic memory, then it is more flexible and transferable between different contexts. When a child changes classes and teachers, concepts in the episodic memory will be much harder to recall without those familiar environmental prompts. The presence of an unfamiliar teacher will mean that the emotional context is also different. Both these changes make remembering stuff harder.
Episodic memories have sensory data anchoring them down to specific contexts. The next step is to set the memory free of their emotional and environmental cues. Solution: be aware of the need for sensory cues and manage your expectations initially with a new class. Some changes can happen straight away. For example, making sure children are not always in the same seat will help.
It is during June and July that you can most effectively plan for this, as this is when most concepts are revisited. Ideally, plan to change the physical setting — maybe by doing some maths in the hall or in the playground, but at the very least by making sure children sit next to different peers.
This way, they will encounter episodically memorised topics without familiar environmental stimuli. This nudges the memory forward on its journey from episodic to semantic. Another way to beat the summer slide is to apply the learning to a different part of the curriculum. For example, DT is ideal for practicing measures outside of the confines of a maths lesson, whether it involves measuring lengths of wood or weighing ingredients for a recipe. Art lessons can involve revising symmetry or fractions.
Reinforce that a half of a shape can be made many different ways by giving children two differently coloured pieces of paper the same size. Get the children to cut one piece in half and discard one of the two halves. The remaining half can be cut into different shapes, and each piece stuck onto the other coloured shape. The resulting pattern will be half one colour, half the other, yet every child will have demonstrated this differently.
Art could also be used to revise ratio. Perhaps launch a class investigation into the effect on tone by adjusting the different proportions of white to red paint. Or, experiment with different amounts of sand and water to see which mixture makes the firmest sandcastle. Definitely one for outside! If you are feeling really brave, you could revise angles by using a water pistol and a giant protractor!
The investigation would test which angle works best if you want to hit a particular target. Although this lesson has the potential to provide lots of distraction to put it mildly , which can result in children paying attention to the wrong thing, it does have a great advantage: it involves children measuring angles vertically as opposed to horizontally.
By explicitly transferring the learning to a different context, we strengthen the conceptual understanding.
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