Get a good night’s sleep. Eat a nutritious breakfast. Don’t wait until the last minute to study. There’s lots of good advice out there regarding helping your kid prepare for a new school year, but what can you do in the “off season” to help them boost their memory?
We’ve put together a list of 10 ideas to help parents work on their children’s memory skills in organic ways that feel like fun:
#1: Have a regular Family Trivia Night.
There are countless trivia games on the market that are age-appropriate for kids and include questions related to school subjects. Just as repetitious physical exercise strengthens the muscles of the body, so too does repetitious mental exercise. Trivia games don’t just boost recall for facts your child already knows; they also teach them new facts that they’ll be learning at school in the fall.
#2: Make shopping trips a memory challenge.
Give your child a shopping list to memorize and see how many items they can recall at the store. Consider teaching them tricks, such as grouping similar items—like dairy—together, or visualizing that peanut butter, mayonnaise, and barbecue sauce sandwich.
#3: Play school and let them be the teacher.
Does your kid have a younger sibling they can pretend to teach? If not, you can fill in. Have them choose a subject they enjoyed in school and encourage them to teach real facts, formulas, or methods as accurately as possible with whatever lesson plan they can dream up!
#4: Give them a day to be in charge of your outing or trip.
Have them plan routes, create a packing list for a picnic, or create a jam-packed schedule full of activities and then ask them to memorize it, explaining any tips they used to help them recall everything.
#5: Assign them the role of songwriter.
Remember those old Schoolhouse Rock jingles—the classic educational animated shorts that taught us about grammar, math, civics, science, and economics?
Ask your kiddo to come up with a song about an age-appropriate topic they may need to in the upcoming school year. It could be state capitals, a song about a specific incident in American history, prepositions, or parts of the body.
#6: Make your own “Concentration” game.
Many of us grew up playing “Concentration,” the memory game in which playing cards are laid face down and players take turns flipping over two cards at a time in an effort to find matches. Your child can make their own version with vocabulary words and their matching definitions on separate cards, or math facts (8 x 8 on one card, 64 on its match).
#7: Play memory-boosting games on Family Game Night.
There are lots of age-appropriate board games and electronic games that boost memory, including Simon (players must repeat the sequence of light and tones correctly) and Clue (players must keep track of clues they’ve seen or ruled out).
#8: Use road trips or commutes to play story chain.
Do you remember the game, “I’m going on a picnic”? The first player says, “I’m going on a picnic and I’m going to bring …” and then names an item that begins with the letter A. The next player repeats everything that that first player says, but then adds their own item that begins with the letter B, and so on. It’s a fun way to pass time, boost memory, and often, get everyone laughing!
#9: Gather 10 (or 20) objects for the tray game.
If you’ve been to a baby shower, you’ve probably played this simple memory game. Just gather small but interesting things (a funny sock, a dog bone, a baby picture, a stick of gum, etc.) from around the house, place them on a tray, and cover them with a towel. Remove the towel for 30 seconds to give your child time to try to remember as many as possible, then recover the tray with the towel as they write down as many as they can recall.
#10: Enroll them in personal brain training.
If you’re concerned that your child’s memory struggles are impacting their academics, summer is a great time to enroll them in a personal brain training program designed to target and train underperforming cognitive skills.
These foundational brain skills are the core skills our brains use to think, read, learn, remember, reason and pay attention. Working together, they take incoming information and move it into the bank of knowledge that we use every day at school, at work, and in life.
Because each of our cognitive skills play a vital role in processing new information, it only takes one underperforming skill (such as working memory), to impact how information is grasped, retained or used. In fact, most learning struggles are caused by one or more weak skills.