Training Children to Remember: Ten Tips for Teachers By Jonathan Hancock, Deputy Head Teacher of St Mary s Catholic Primary School in Brighton and Former World Memory Champion
Teach that memory isn t something you own, it s something you do. Introduce children to the idea of memory strategies and skills. Tell them that people have been training their memories since ancient times, and that there are tried and tested techniques that work brilliantly today. Excite your class about the prospect of learning how to remember. It ll be energetic, challenging, fun and really useful, in school and out.
Prove that they already have amazing memories Talk to your children about all the things they do remember, especially when they re interested, attentive and motivated to learn. Find out who knows most about football, music, dinosaurs Get them discussing their earliest memories, song lyrics, trivia, favourite adverts. We all remember huge amounts of information every day; and by learning a bit about how our memory works we can start to make it work, for everything.
Get them to pay attention To remember well you need to engage with the information at hand. Work on your children s listening skills, their concentration spans and their ability to prioritise key ideas. When you want them to remember something specific, make the task as explicit as possible even if it s something as simple as a set of classroom instructions. Get them into the habit of highlighting the key information and then choosing the best thinking tools for the job.
Explore the power of pictures Whenever possible, encourage children to visualise the things you re talking about. Instead of giving them abstract instructions, offer them clear and memorable images. Speak in stories; use visual aids; ask them to imagine scientific processes, historical moments, conversations between literary characters as if they were actually watching them for real. Help them to learn by accessing the powerful pictures that drive memory.
Activate their imagination Celebrate the power of imagination by discussing children s dreams, favourite stories and films. Talk about what they see when they re listening to an audio book or enjoying a piece of instrumental music. Teach your children to start inventing their own creative images to remind them of all the real things they want to know. Encourage them to pick the funniest, strangest, most energetic, colourful, emotional, memorable pictures: powerful image-clues that will stick in their mind and take them back to the real information.
Teach the power of a good story Explain that stories have always been used to store important information. Discuss what makes some stories particularly memorable: their structure, powerful descriptions, striking ideas Practise turning lists of words, names or facts into stories, where each item links to the next. Even a shopping list can become an exciting, surreal, unforgettable story, as you try pouring tomato sauce into a cup of tea, but accidentally knock it all into a bowl of strawberries, which come to life and scream in pain until you cool them down with some ice-cream In school, lists of key words, places, names, theories, instructions: they can all be given images, which are then connected into weird, wonderful, memorable stories
Take memory journeys Teach your children to use the ancient memory journeys system. They think of a route they know around a building, say, on a countryside walk or through the town centre then start putting their images in place around it. To rediscover the information, they simply retrace their mental footsteps. Each stopping-point on the journey can hold a remarkable amount of information. You know the route without thinking, so trust it to store all your imageclues in exactly the right order.
Play memory games Pelmanism is a timeless memory game: a set of cards laid out face down, with the players taking it in turns to look at two of them. Every time someone gets a pair, they keep it to add to their tally. Focus and strategy are important, but get the children exploring other memory techniques that might help. The tray game is also a good bit of brain-training, perhaps as an earlystart activity or brain-break. Show a set of everyday items, give the children a few moments to commit them to memory (maybe with an imagined story or memory journey) then see if they can spot the one you ve secretly taken away.
Encourage your class to see, hear and do Offer each child several different angles on their learning. Some will need things to look at, while others will rely more on listening to your explanations or doing something physical themselves; but all of them will benefit from a mix of all three. Whatever habits they ve got into, help them to extend and enrich their approach to learning, creating multi-layered memories that last.
Challenge them to remember anything Keep asking children how they re going to remember something. Which system or strategy would work best for a particular piece of information? Which images would trigger the key memories, and how could they be structured and stored? Encourage your pupils to start asking those questions for themselves and to find their own applications for the techniques they ve learnt. Memory skills can be used in very practical ways, helping children to organise themselves, save time and feel more confident; but they can also enhance learning in every lesson in the curriculum. So encourage your class to find the mind tricks that work best for them, then to push themselves to see what they can do, and just how far they can go.
About the Junior Memory Championship The Junior Memory Championship is a pioneering educational project from The Learning Skills Foundation. Now in its fifth year, the competition promotes memory techniques in schools, working with teachers to introduce pupils to the benefits of powerful learning strategies. When your school signs up to take part in the Championship you will receive an INSET pack which comprises detailed lesson plans which fit into the curriculum including a full memory training programme for Year 6, video clips, materials to develop learning skills and access for all your children to the online Junior Memory Club To find out more or sign up visit: www.juniormemorychampionship.com
Jonathan Hancock Jonathan Hancock with the finalists of the 2012 Junior Memory Championship. 2012 Winner Niki Mehta memorised 36 digits, recalled a sequence of 35 random words, scored 98% in the names-and-faces test and achieved 100% accuracy in a quiz about London history.