Maxi-Memory Pets

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.

Space and time are at the heart of children's daily activities: drawing, writing, moving a piece on a game board, putting together a puzzle or building a building, as well as identifying landmarks to get from one point to another. All of these call for spatial organization and orientation. Furthermore, telling a story, correctly ordering a sequence of events, learning the time, and carrying out an activity in a set amount of time all call for temporal organization and orientation. All of these concepts are gradually developed through various motor and cognitive skills. This is easily observed in the development of children's language when they use the words inside, outside, next to, behind, before, after, yesterday and tomorrow. In short, skills related to spatial and temporal organization impact several areas of children's development.

From the first babbling of a baby to the oral presentations of primary school children in front of the class, the concept of language undergoes a lot of development! From their first months, children need to communicate. To do this, they listen attentively to sounds and try to respond in their own way. Little by little, they understand that things and people are associated with sounds, and they try to reproduce them to make themselves understood. They make progress simultaneously in comprehension and expression, and they acquire vocabulary thanks to daily exchanges with their parents and educators. Children also exercise their ability to communicate and express their emotions during role-playing games and by adapting their speech to the situation they create. Spoken language can also be stimulated by all sorts of interventions: looking at books, learning nursery rhymes and songs, telling stories, discussing past events, making connections, and asking questions. Playing with words and finding rhymes and words that start with the same sound are all exercises in phonological awareness that help to perceive and identify the different components of words. Several studies prove that a child's language background impacts their success when learning to read and write.