Emotions help your children remember their learning
If you want your children to remember what they are learning then get emotional!
That’s the message from top researchers such as James McGaugh.
He says that emotions “do enhance retention” and notes that the brain becomes more active when a person is in an emotional state and this therefore aids learning.
If you think back to your childhood what things can you remember? I’ll bet that the easiest things are those that involved a high degree of emotion whether this was something positive such a happy event or something not so great and may have been upsetting.
So how can you use this knowledge to help you help your children with their learning and education?
How can you help them to success?
The common denominator of these easily remembered times is their higher than usual emotional content. Your brain has become wired with these emotional memories. The same is true for all aspects of our lives, for example for me it’s that great holiday I had in Spain with the children 2 years ago or that lousy boring wet summer spent on the West Coast of Ireland 25 years ago.
The link between emotion and retention of memory therefore suggests that if learning can be linked to good positive emotions then the content of that learning will be much more easily remembered.
We have a phrase at The Learning Well which we use in relation to children learning and that is “make it fun, then you’ve won” and that’s exactly what you need to do to help your children with their learning.
If you make it fun and your children are happy then they are much more likely to retain that learning.
At school the mantra is often to suppress the emotions and that’s understandable because a class of 25 children learning in a heightened state of emotion could be chaos. This need not be the case at home or outside of school. Here you can chose to create a happy, fun state of mind for when your children are learning and this will help them remember and learn.
How?
Work with your children whilst they are learning and make it fun, have a laugh, be outrageous, linking all this to the things the children are learning. Essentially you as the parent take part in collaborative learning with your children, having a lot of fun whilst doing so.
