Mapping is a brilliant memory technique making it easy for children to remember what they have read and at the same improve their learning and recall of the subject
When your children read their understanding, learning, and recall of the subject matter will significantly improve if you use a memory technique that makes a pattern, representation or model of the written material.
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.
