As a therapist I see students on a daily basis that have difficulty with retaining information. As a parent you may have even said to your child a hundred times,
" I JUST told you that!"
Children with language deficits find it very difficult to retain information in their working memory. So, if a student was given the directions to do the following tasks:
“Please give me the red pencil, then pick up the blue eraser and put it in the green box"
it would be difficult for that student to hold that information in his memory. Most students either remember the first portion or the last portion and would not be able to carry out the tasks accurately. Most children with language delays cannot get over their weaknesses without interventions.
There are many ways to increase memory skills and the working memory of children. Try some of the following strategies and make it an enjoyable play activity with your child.
*...Pretend to be a chef and have 5-6 items of food you are going to cook on a tray. Tell the child to look at the items and that you are going to take one food off. Next, the child closes his eyes, you remove a food item, when the child opens his eyes, he must guess what food item is missing. Keep adding more foods when he/she is ready to store more information in his memory. To make it more challenging, have the child name all the food items without looking what he saw on the tray.
*...Play the game MEMORY with cards. This is like the simple memory matching game.
*...Call out three numbers to the child and see if he can remember the list of the numbers (i.e. 15, 21, 100). Each time, add more and more numbers. If the child can only remember 4, then just work on 4 until he can advance.
*...Make up complex sentence cards. For example, the card may read "Johnny wore his red stripped shirt to the zoo and his painted black shirt to the park." Encourage your child to draw out the pictures to help him visualize what was said.
These are just a few ways to increase your child's working memory skills. Try out the many apps that can be used to increase your child's memory skills also!!
