Hi, this is Alan, Mandip and Tony from The Learning Well

We are launching a series of Free Workshops to help parents improve their children’s Memory abilities. Improving Memory  has a hugely positive affect on Learning performance & Literacy .

Being able to remember easily is vital for schoolwork, tests and exams.

The Workshops are taking place all over London and the surrounding areas.

Once you have been to a Workshop you will know how to boost your children’s ability to remember and learn using a brilliant technique - Memory Mapping.

To attend and book the Free Workshops, you can visit the following website www.Meetup.com/The-Learning-well.

The workshops will positively help you to improve your children’s Memory and therefore Literacy and all related subjects resulting in much greater success in their schooling and studies. Here’s how.

The Learning Well uses a brilliant method called Memory Mapping that provides a step-by-step guide to follow that really works.

Memory Mapping is used to improve memory and improves studying, revision, homework, essay and story writing, creative writing, and speaking in front of groups and is used by both children and adults.

Mapping is simple, easy, structured, and very, very effective.

Encompassing the best ways of learning The Learning Well’s learning philosophy is summarised by the following phrases  - ‘Speak to learn’, ‘If you can say it you know it’ ,‘Visual learning at its best’ and ‘Learning for the 21st Century’. The workshops will explain how to apply these in a very practical, easy way that will help you to greatly improve your children’s Memory &  Learning.

The methods we use really do work. 

These Free Workshops will help you help your children improve their Memory abilities and therefore their Learning performance, literacy and related subjects . We hope to see you there. 

Anthony Robbins says that “what we consider possible or impossible is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.”

How can you be a teacher to your children?

You can help your children learn outside the classroom, you can therefore be a teacher to your children.

Have you said to yourself I can’t do that, or that’s just not me or that would be impossible to do? If so you have, as Robbins says, “run up against the barriers of a limited identity”.

You have confined what you are able to do within certain boundaries because you see yourself as not being able to do something, it has become what you are and it has become part of your identity.

This is fine if you are dealing with something that is bad or just plain wrong. For example if you say to yourself “I’m not a car thief, that’s just not me”.

But what happens if you believe you are not something or can’t do something which if you could, would be of benefit to you and to others. What if you believe that you cannot help your children learn,what if you believe that you cannot be a teacher to them?

In this case the world has lost something special.

And if you do believe that you as a parent are also a teacher, if you expand your boundaries, and being a teacher becomes part of your identity, what then? Well, you and your children will have gained something really special.

The habit of better questions leads to better answers, better feelings and better motivation for when they are learning.

Are questions the answer to better learning?

Do you like questions? What a question!

We are all wired to be interested and fascinated by questions.

Just think of the following successful programs on TV.

Mastermind
Eggheads
Family fortunes
The weakest link
Who wants to be a millionaire?

Why are they are so successful? What is it about these programs that make them so popular?

The answer is that they are all about ………QUESTIONS!

People love questions, our minds are programmed to be interested in questions, and of course children love questions.

In fact you and your children think by using questions. Questions are the building blocks to thinking and children are natural question machines continually asking questions and if given the opportunity they soak up knowledge like sponges.

As soon as you or your children ask a question the mind focuses on finding the answer. The very act of asking a question causes the mind to think because thinking is the process of asking and answering questions.

Think about a simple thing like making dinner this evening. What are you thinking about? I’ll bet that you are asking questions, it can’t be helped. You automatically start to ask questions that need an answer. What will we eat? At what time? How many people is the dinnner for? There could be many other questions.

So, thinking is all about posing questions and receiving answers.

When you help your children ask questions and provide answers you are helping them with their thinking skills.

And so what questions should you ask and how can you get your children thinking?

The answer is by creating the right questions.

What questions to ask?

Do you remember the film The Jungle Book made by Walt Disney? This film was based on a story by the writer and explorer Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling wrote in his poem the Elephant’s Child:

“I keep six honest serving men,
They taught me all I knew,
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who?

We like to put these questions in this order:

What, where, when, how, why, who? We think it has a certain ‘ring’ to it this way.

The questions then need to be put in a way that helps your child think and find answers.

For example why not try the following with your child or children like I did not so long ago.

Go to a historical place and ask six questions beginning with the six words. For example:

What is this place?
Where is this place?
When did people live here?
How did they live?
Why don’t they live here anymore?
Who lived here?

So, questioning is one the most important skills that you can teach and guide your child to improve their ability to think and learn.

Questions help motivation!

At The Learning Well questions are continually asked and answered and you will hear us say “better questions, better answers, better life”. This is because in addition to thinking and learning, questions can also improve your children’s motivation.

How?

Because questions can change the focus of the mind towards better answers and these better answers can change the way your children feel. Better answers and better feelings leads to better motivation.

This next point is very important!

You can be an expert!

To repeat what was said above. Children are great at asking questions and you as a parent can be the expert at giving them the bigger view by putting questions into context. Putting questions to your children is a chance for you to guide them to create the amazing habit of continuously asking better questions.

The habit of better questions leads to better answers, better feelings and as we have seen better motivation.

Phil Race said that “All knowledge is the answer to a question”

So, to go back to the original question, yes, we think that better questions are indeed the answer to greatly improving your children’s learning!

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.

Were you ever in a lesson at school or a lecture at college in which the teacher or lecturer spoke and spoke and spoke and went on and on and on for hours on end? Did you learn anything?

I have been in just such a situation several times and I have to say trying to keep my attention was like torture. Did I do any learning? Did I retain anything? Not a bean! Such lessons to me where as useful as an asthmatic ant carrying heavy shopping to my house, no use at all! (Thank you for that line Blackadder).

Why are long continuous lessons such ineffective learning strategies?

Well, because as researchers and writers such as Eric Jensen have concluded “the brain learns best in the pattern of a pulse. Learning is best when focused, diffused, focused, diffused…..”.

So what are the best learning strategies?

The best learning strategies have activities based on a start, stop, start, stop approach.

Your children learn for a relatively short period of time and then take a break, doing something else in the break. After the break you start the learning once again.

This then gives the brain the best chance of remembering what you have learned.
Jensen says that if you are working with young learners that activities should be limited to 5 to 10 minutes, for adolescents 10 to 15 minutes and interestingly for adults 15 to 25 minutes.

The point is this; when you as a parent are helping your children with their learning, by far the best learning strategies are based on, as we say at The Learning Well, doing it “little and often”.

If you ask your children to carry out an activity or activities and follow the ‘little and often’ approach your children will be learning in the best way; they will be learning in the ‘pattern of a pulse’ and using one of the very best learning strategies.