Take Gem All

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).

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.

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.

Creativity is the ability to imagine, build and implement something new or to discover an original solution to a problem. It is, therefore, not limited to the arts alone and develops gradually from the age of 18 months. Given its importance in a child’s development, we should seize every opportunity to stimulate it daily. Indeed, a child who has learned to be creative will have good problem-solving and conflict-solving skills, expressing themselves, exploring and finding new ideas. All types of games and activities contribute to nurturing creativity. It is important to provide the child with a variety of materials that the child can explore and use as he or she pleases. In children’s games, an ordinary piece of fabric suddenly becomes a cape, a picnic mat, a blanket for dolls, and so much more! Books, nursery rhymes, dressing-up and improvisation games, for example, fuel the imagination in wonderful ways and inspire fun in the young and old alike.