I have been amazed at how many things my preschooler is memorizing at school. She is like a sponge and learning so much, and luckily, she has a great teacher who is positive and gives them lots of positive things to learn and think about.
After her first couple of weeks at school, she was sitting at the table eating her lunch after school, and then turned to me and quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson. She even said his name at the end of the quote! I turned to her and said, “Wait. What did you say?” And she repeated it to me again and again. So every now and then, she’ll come home with a new one. Here’s the one she told me last week:
“Stick to a task, till it sticks to you. For beginners are many, but finishers are few!” -Thomas S. Monson
I love this quote! And, how wonderful of a lesson it is for a child to learn at such a young age.
Memorization is something that we don’t often think about helping our children do at such a young age. But, many times, it is the way they learn. Think about those amazing kids we’ve seen on TV that already know all the Presidents, or states and capitals at 2 or 3 years old. It is possible.
So, why not help your child memorize some things that are important to you and your family? Ideas for things your child could memorize include:
*A favorite scripture verse
*A poem
*A quote
*A favorite song
*Your family mantra
*A Nursery Rhyme
Whatever it is, memorizing can only help your child in the future. Studies have shown that memorizing increases brain power. We all know this. A great article, In Defense of Memorization by Michael Knox Beran, addresses just this issue. One of my favorite things he stated in this article is:
“What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience.”
And, when their brains are ready to soak up anything you give them, why not start with giving them positive thoughts from the very beginning?
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