Kids are naturally endowed with curious minds that are always exploring and tasting things. As such, their memory and recall functions develop inordinately. You can further enhance your child’s memory by getting your child to participate in these fun memory improvement activities.
1. Memorizing And Recalling Faces
Introduce a new person to your kid. When the visitor has left, ask your kid to recall the visitor’s looks. Your kid should be able to give you a minute description of the person’s eyebrows, ears, nose, chin, hairline, mouth, complexion and chin.
2. Recalling Objects
Place about 20 different objects on a tray and ask your child to study them. Take the tray away after a few minutes and ask your child to remember as many of the objects as possible. Then, hand your child the objects and the tray separately; ask your child to place each object exactly as it was before.
3. The What’s Missing Game
Put twenty objects on the tray and allow your kids to view it for a minute. Then cover the tray with a cloth and discreetly remove an object from it. Display the tray again and ask them to identify the missing object. You can add or remote multiple items to the tray to further intensify this game.
4. Make Them Learn Songs
Play a new song every week on your CD player and ask let your children sing along with you. After two three rounds, switch off the player and ask the child to sing as much of the song he or she remembers. Give points for excellent recall of tune and lyrics. Test their knowledge again after a week or so.
5. Get Them To Adapt Different Lyrics To Song Tunes
Teach them a song with a complex tune. Then ask them to adapt random lyrics to the same tune. They’ll have to keep remembering parts of the tune to accurately fit other lyrics into it. Don’t help them with the tune unless they hit a snag.
6. Use Picture Book Tricks
Take a plain book, and paste attractive and fun pictures on some pages. Number all the pages and ask your kids to locate all the occurrences of a certain picture, while remembering the page number. Test their memory power at the end of this exercise.
7. The Spot The Red Telephone Booth Game
Take them on a long drive and ask them to spot all occurrences of a stationary object such as a red telephone booth. The kids must maintain an accurate count of the exact number of red telephone booths you passed. At the end of the drive, test if they’ve noticed all the booths. As an additional exercise, ask them how many booths were in front of gas stations, how many in front of stores and how many were on the pavement.
8. Remember Your Classmates Game
Ask your kids to close their eyes and visualize their classrooms. Then ask them to write down the number of kids in the classroom along with each one’s name. If your kids are not able to identify everyone, ask them to observe the class kids on the next day, retain the names to memory and then repeat the same exercise with them. This time, ask them mention the hair color of each kid alongside that kid’s name.
9. The People Watching Game
Seat them in a park or a public place and ask them to observe a group of people in general. After going home, ask them to identify how many kids were playing in the park, what were they wearing, what kinds of balls were they playing with and so on. To make this interesting, you can carry a video camera along and capture the scene that your kids are supposed to observe. Match their recollections with your video evidence and reward the winner.
10. Play The List Game
Write down two lists of at least 10 items, as given below:
List 1: Paper, pencil, table, chair, ball, dress, robot, drum, coconut, cartoon
List 2: Apple, orange, train, glass, pipe, school, mountain, valley, rock, house
Ask them to read both lists and memorize as much as possible and then take away the lists. Check their memory by randomly handing out a word, such as ‘house’. The kids are supposed to identify if ‘house’ was on List 1 or List 2. This game helps improve memory and powers of concentration.
11. The Grocery List Game
Write out a long grocery list and ask your kids to memorize it. Take them grocery shopping but be sure to hide the list where they can’t see it. Ask them to remember as many items as they can and add those to your trolley. Then ask them to memorize the exact aisle from where they picked up the items. Next week, give them another grocery list; this time, insist that they should identify the aisle in which the item will be present and get it from there without prompting.
12. The Phone Number Game
Give your kids two or three random phone numbers and ask them to memorize them. Ask them to repeat the numbers an hour later. After 3 hours, ask them again. Keep repeating this exercise every few hours and then drop it. After a week, find out if they still remember those numbers. In all likelihood, they will.
Teena is working for SelfDevelopment.net, a home of self development resources and articles where you can grab self-hypnosis Cds and NLP Programs recordings from world’s best hypnotists.