Kids have a natural tendency to repeat the things they like, for example my kids will watch the same film a hundred times and they just love it whereas me, if I watch a film once it would have to be three years before I could watch it again.

So, when kids like something, they want to do it over and over and over again. So how can you encourage your children to repeat things that help them improve their learning and abilities at school.

As Children are wired to repeat what they like, this fact can be used to increase their knowledge. Here is how!

Using fun techniques such as The Learning Well Memory Map is an easy learning method that can be used to increase children’s skills in writing, speaking and almost all areas of literacy learning and children will therefore want to use them time and time again.

Repeated use of mapping massively increases their abilities in all areas including schoolwork.

These Memory Mapping skills are explained in more detail elsewhere on this Blog.

What is Memory Mapping?

Well it’s a bit like Tony Buzan’s Mind Mapping highly focused on the skills of learning and remembering in a very easy and structured fun way.

Here is an example of a Memory Map to help someone speak about Memory Mapping.

Both kids and adults love the technique and the point is that your children will want to use it time and again.

What learning activities can you encourage your children to do to help them stay focused on their learning?

Put simply what do you do when you are at home and want to help your children with their learning and maintain their concentration, focus and energy?

The answer is simple and believe it or not, you do have the necessary learning resource at your fingertips to help your children maintain their concentration.

What is this resource?

When they are learning get your children to stand up and that way they will be more focused, full of energy and their concentration will be more likely to be maintained. Sounds too simple? Too good to be true?

Well, Dr Max Vercruyssen of the University of South Carolina doesn’t think so. He has found that the way a person positions their body has a marked affect on their ability to learn and retain focus. He therefore recommends that amongst the many learning resources available that standing is used to improve learning.

Two things help your children when standing. First the blood and oxygen flow to the brain increases significantly and secondly the psychological affect on the child is to make them much more alert with the brain then learning more.

What activities could your children undertake when standing so that their concentration is maintained and their learning improves?

As you may know The Learning Well recommends children and adults to produce Memory Maps to help with learning.

Memory Mapping uses a combination of location, words, images, and colour and a Map can be produced whilst standing and moving about, all learning activities and learning resources that massively help concentration are great fun, keep boredom away, and result in a great improvement in your children’s ability to learn. So memory mapping is one way of addressing this point.

You can learn about Memory Mapping and Memory Maps and how to use them for learning here at this Blog.

The Learning Well Method in combination with Memory Mapping is a very,very, strong learning and memory technique for helping you massively improve your children’s academic and literacy abilities.

We have walked the path of The Learning Well Method in improving the abilities of many children and now we want to teach you how you can walk with us so that you too can help your children massively improve their learning and learning abilities.

We said that we would summarize for you the four stages of The Learning Well Method. We have covered three so far and so here is the fourth and final part of the Method.

4) Do what works

Everyone has their own style and preferred method of learning. Success is about looking at what works and then putting it into practice to make it a habit. Encourage your children to use the Memory Maps to speak about the things that they are interested in and to talk about their schoolwork.

Help your children to make Memory Mapping a habit, so that they use Mapping over and over and over again and see the results as their abilities improve.

Ask them to use their maps to help them tell you all about the subject of a map. See what they know.

Remember, if they can say it then they know it!.

The Method is summarised by the phrase “SPEAK TO LEARN”. If your children can speak about a subject they know about that subject and can write about it when the time comes.

It’s that simple and easy as that. All you have to do is put it into practice and make it a habit.

We hope that you have enjoyed this four part summary of The Learning Well Method and that it has given you an understanding of how your children’s abilities can be greatly improved.

We’ll say it again; if your children can say it then they know it. They can cover masses of learning ground using Memory Mapping.

Please do give it a go. You will enjoy it and so will your children.

Remember – Make it fun, then you’ve won.

See you in the next Blog.

Emmmm, what shall we talk about next? Ah yes ……………………

You probably have read about the first two stages of The Learning Well Method of learning. We now have reached stage 3. If not we invite you to read our earlier two Blog entries before reading this one.

3) The third stage is – Do you know it?

We believe that the important thing when ‘testing’ is for your children to be able to express what they know.

The Memory Map can be used to test what your child or children know about the subject, as written down in their Memory Maps.

At the heart of this system, is creating the habit of expressing what your children know without a judgment about getting it wrong. There is no failure, there are only results. Instead of criticizing, the testing process is about gaining feedback and learning what can be improved on next time. How do you do this?

How long does it take to write a Memory Map? Not long. As your child thinks about what the content of their Map will be, they can express these thoughts and write them or draw them onto the Memory Map.

There is writing involved in creating a Memory Map, but by far the most important thing to do is to encourage your children to speak about the content of their Maps and what they know.

To remind you what a Map looks like here is the one that we had in our earlier Blog about Part two of The Learning Well Method:

When your children have completed a Map on a school subject, or a subject of their choice, to ‘test them’ you will ask them to verbally tell you about the subject of their Map. As we speak at 100-150 words a minute, far far more ground will be covered on a subject by speaking about it rather than if you only ask a child to write down what they are learning as an essay.

Speaking is KEY to the secret of using The Learning Well Method when testing.

When your children can speak it they know it!

Which is why we have a phrase at The Learning Well which really captures the Method;

“SPEAK TO LEARN”

If your child or children can speak about the subject then they know about the subject and can then, when the time comes, write about it. It’s really very easy and if you use the Method it will make a huge difference to your children’s abilities.

In the next Blog we will set out the fourth and final part of The Learning Well Method.

You can see by now how the whole system comes together to make a very strong learning technique.

We said that we would let you into the secret of The Learning Well method and so as promised here is the second stage of the method.

2) The second stage is – Action Steps

The Learning Well Method uses The Learning Well Memory Map system for its action steps to greatly improve learning in any area and provide a step-by-step guide for you to follow and help your children improve.

Using the Method little and often achieves outstanding results, so take action in little steps and do it frequently.

Here is an overview of the Memory Mapping skill using a completed Memory Map.

The MEMORY MAP that you can see here represents a landscape A4 sheet of paper. Though this one is created using images downloaded from the net and words that are typed, you and your children can produce them using just pens and pencils and draw and write freehand.

In the middle, put the central word, words, idea, or topic on the subject that interests your child. Surrounding the central word are placed 6 other words, ideas or topics, including little drawings, with lines joining these new words to the central one.

No more than 6 words or ideas linked to the idea in the middle.

2 or 3 more words can be linked to each of the 6 words surrounding the central one.

This gives you a framework and structure for creative expression which is brilliant for memorizing and brilliant for seeing how ideas link together and is also ideal for testing.

The subject of this particular Memory Map shows you how to memory map, but it could be about any subject or topic that your children need to learn for school or a subject that they are interested in. At this stage please don’t worry what the particular words and pictures mean in this particular Memory Map. Remember this Map is focused on explaining how to do a memory map.

You will eventually learn how to do mapping and your children will greatly improve their abilities using them. It really is very simple.

Part 3 of The Learning Well Method will be found in our next Blog entry. See you there!

Thanks for all the great feedback on our articles and reports. Its fantastic to know that it has been of use to so many of you and of course your children.

We spoke to a London based Head Teacher yesterday who was looking for ways of motivating children to do more outside of the classroom to improve their literacy and learning. During the discussion she asked us to summarize The Learning Well four stage Method of learning for children.

Just what is the secret of the method that has a tremendous impact on children’s literacy and related subjects and is so really very easy to learn?

We told her the answer and would love you to have The Learning Well Method summary as well.

Why? Because you can easily use the method to massively improve your children’s abilities at school!

We will therefore summarize the method in this Blog and three further Blogs as the method is a four stage process.
So, here is the first part of the summary that we produced:

There are 4 Stages of learning -

1) Whatever you are LEARNING
2) Take action STEPS
3) Ask, do you KNOW IT?
4) Do what WORKS

To remember this, think of the mnemonic:

“Learning Steps Know It Works”

The first of these stages is expanded upon in this Blog and the other three will follow very shortly.

The Learning Well Method Part 1

1) The first stage is learning

There are many areas that your children will need to learn and School provides an environment in which children work fairly hard.
However, the work at school will not be studied so readily at home.

If you try and carry out the same type of work, it is unlikely to be successful. Up goes the cry “I want to do something else”, watch TV, play computer games, sports, anything other than doing yet ‘more learning’. Even homework has the advantage of the fact that it must be completed for school. Any extra work is therefore a struggle.

So how do we help you to overcome this problem?

The answer is that the work has to be more interesting and more fun!

Instead of doing ‘more school work’ you need to meet your children in areas of their own interest. This could be those TV programs, computer games, sports; really just about anything that interests them. This will create motivation. Your children will want to use The Learning Well Method, because its fun!

Please do suspend your own judgment of what constitutes work, particularly academic work. Besides school subjects there are many other opportunities in your children’s lives that can provide the basis for their learning. Ideas to help you in this regard can be found throughout this Blog.

Please remember this.

YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR CHILD’S LITERACY AND ACADEMIC ABILITIES DRAMATICALLY WITHOUT DOING SCHOOLWORK.

With the method you make it fun, then you’ve won!

The second stage of The Learning Well Method will be provided in our next Blog.

The brain processes, stores and recalls learning and experience in the form of different visual imagery, sounds and feelings. Images can be large, small, bright, dim, colour, black and white.Sounds can be loud, quite, have a rhythm or be random. Feelings can be hot, cold, hard, soft, fast, and slow.

The ways of describing how the brain processes and recalls are of course far more than we have set out here and this multitude of possible descriptions is a powerful pointer to the best way for you to experience learning and for your brain to learn.

For many people who want to learn something the method they will use will be to read and re read a script until such time as they can “remember” it. Obviously this is making use of just one method available to the brain for learning and most people, including children, will recall only a small portion of what they have read in this way.

Is there a better way? Yes there is!

The multiple ways the brain stores information points to the best way of learning as involving many different images, sounds and feelings and this is supported by many researchers and commentators.

To quote Eric Jensen “the brain seems to thrive immensely by pursuing multi-path , multimodal experiences”.

To aid and increase the rate of learning you can use methods that use imagery and pictures of all sorts, locations, words, sounds and feelings. Methods that use these factors directly respond to the need for the multi-path methods required for learning. Memory Mapping is a method of learning that uses all these factors.

Memory Maps are therefore brilliant for learning in just this way which is why we so strongly recommend them at The Learning Well. They are therefore great for learning just about anything and achieve outstanding results for you and your children.

So, how can you and your children best learn?

Have a look at other areas of this Blog and our reports and detailed explanations of Memory Mapping. Why not give it a go and improve your abilities and very importantly those of your children!

So says the work of various researchers, so why not do this and greatly help your children to make learning easy.

How can you make and use a model and and the same time significantly improve your children’s abilities in literacy and all related subjects?

When the researchers did their analysis using such a memory technique, their test subjects were given the task of linking fictional characters movements and goals to imagined locations.This made it much easier for the test subjects to remember what the characters were doing. The link with locations made all the difference to their ability to learn and remember.

Eric Jensen’s metaphor illustrates matters nicely;

“When you arrive in a city, you not only want to know how to get where you’re going, but also where you are in relationship to where everything else is located”.

Therefore to easily remember something you are reading you can create a map with locations linked to the ideas, facts and characters you wish to learn and create the overall picture as well. The brain will then have places at which to store these key factors and will be able to see how it all fits together, enabling the reader to recall far more easily than you would if they had simply read a script.

Try reading a script without using a memory technique and then recalling its content. Difficult isn’t it!

Practically speaking what should you do to improve your recall, what sort of ‘MAP’ and memory technique should you use? How do you create places in which to locate the information and ideas that you need. How do you get the overall picture into which everything fits?

The best and easiest memory technique that diectly addresses these points is to use is Memory Mapping. We strongly recommend Memory Mapping for creating a pattern for your children’s reading and learning, to help them remember the things that they are interested in, or that they have to learn for school.

Memory Mapping is designed for use by both adults and children and uses a combination of location, words, images, and colour, to help with learning and memorising.

This is an example of a Memory Map the subject of which is Memory Maps, but it could be about any subject.

These maps therefore directly compliment the work of the researchers referred to above, and their use will result in a great improvement in your children’s ability to remember and recall written material.

Mapping is also great for summarising your own written material and for remembering the content of talks and presentations.

This Blog gives free information on how to use Memory Maps and also gives you a free Memory Map template that you can use yourself and also encourage your children to use.

Please feel free to download all the ‘free stuff’ on the Blog and the site. It really will make a huge difference to you and your children.