Magnetic Letters

Sensory, short-term, long-term: there are different types of memory, which all work together. Sensory memory very briefly retains the information gathered by the senses, just long enough to store it in short-term memory. Short-term memory then only lasts a few seconds, but it allows you to process and retain information to store it in long-term memory for days, months, or even your entire life to retain significant events, the meaning of words, manual skills, etc. If you want play and memory development in children to go hand-in-hand, remember this: observation is important for memory development. You must limit the amount of information that a child must retain at once and make connections between the game he or she is playing with you and his or her past experiences (a visit to the farm, a party, or a book, for example, exercises his or her long-term memory and can enrich the activity you are doing).

We ask children to exercise this skill every day in a multitude of activities. It is important to know that observation is never practiced alone: observing always requires concentration. This allows us to maintain attention while we gather information and commit it to our memory. How can we encourage the development of observation skills in children? First, it is important that the type of game and the difficulty level chosen are adapted to the child. The environment must be conducive to focus; it is essential to limit sources of distraction and to make the child comfortable. Guiding the child by asking questions can also help. To stimulate observation skills, we usually gravitate towards memory games, sorting games, sequence games or puzzles of all kinds, and that is great! But observation can also be practiced with all our senses. There are a variety of materials and activities that allow children to listen, touch, taste, look, smell, etc.

Concentration is the ability to focus attention on a single subject. Whether with work, reading or play, the process is always the same, and it is essential for learning. However, the ability to concentrate varies greatly depending on age and neurological development. Play is a natural ally of concentration. Anyone who has observed a child playing can attest to this. Many things can stimulate concentration. First, it is important to provide the child with a favourable learning environment: limit noise, have adequate physical and material organization, and fit the task duration as well as the challenge level to the child's abilities. Encouraging the child to follow a path with their finger, closing their eyes so that they listen to sounds, and reminding them of some of the characteristics of the task are strategies that help develop concentration. Finally, asking the child what they did to complete a task allows them to apply their strategies in other contexts.

Learning to identify written words and understanding their meaning is a major challenge for a 6-year-old child. Reading is a process that begins in first grade and is perfected throughout primary school. More than a visual decoding exercise involving knowledge of the alphabet and the ability to recognize words in general, reading requires that the child develop strategies to understand the meaning of the text. In addition, understanding texts is very important in learning all other school subjects. Producing a text calls upon several skills that must all be used simultaneously but which are gradually acquired during primary school through lessons in writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation.