How to help your child remember what they have been taught
Has your child ever said they haven’t been taught something when you know they have? Can they not remember what they’ve been taught in school?
Learning is not about have a good memory, it is about having a good strategy.
My top tip is to understand why forgetting happens and to find a good strategy to help remembering to take place.
The forgetting curve
When you learn something you then forget it (the curve on the left), when you then learn it again you forget it a little bit less (the curve on the right). This is why revision works and is necessary. You need to keep going over things so that they get embedded in your memory and you are able to recall it really easily. You’ll see from the curve the more times you go over something the easier it is to remember it.
How to help your child
Here are a few strategies to help use the concept of the forgetting curve to help your child remember what they’ve been taught
- Get the information from the school about what they’ve learnt and the following week they do a couple of questions on that topic. Two weeks later do another couple of questions, three weeks later again to another couple of questions and so on.
- Keep record cards with what they’ve learnt and get them going over a few of them each day. They soon have a large stash of cards but they need to revisit a lot of it less and less often. They can be great for a bit of revision over the summer and minimising the school holiday ‘dip’.
- Buy some workbooks for the year that they’re in and get them to do a little bit each week. There are workbooks and revision guides available for all year groups such as these by cgp. It might be that your child needs one from the day before or the year above so you could ask the teacher which one they recommend.
- There are plenty of websites and apps with games for different areas of maths. Use these to go over some of the maths they’ve been taught.
Little and often is the key here, it is important to be going over the things they have been taught at school. I’d love to hear how you get on.
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