After we have told you the secret we are also going to tell you how you can use this knowledge to help your children and give them one of the best chances you can for their education and learning. To explain, the first thing we are going to give you is the results of some brilliant research.

Many researchers have reached a very clear and stark conclusion when it comes to education and learning. Their brilliant insight is that experience of facts, information, or ideas prior to formal learning makes learning quicker and easier and formal education performance much better.

Bower and Mann found that learning and recollection improved when learning material was put into a pattern and given to learners prior to their formal learning of that material.

Well and Murphy in the Encyclopedia of Educational Research say that prior experience of subject matter is a very powerful factor in improving learners subsequent learning and education.

The basic point is this; to help your children to improve  results at school as you can get them to learn the subject matter outside of school before they do the subject in school.

But isn’t this difficult, doesn’t this take masses of time?

The answer to both of these questions is no, it can take just a little time when you use the right technique to help your children!

The technique to use to help your children learn quickly and easily, and which gives them the prior experience argued for by the researchers, and that will help them get ahead is Memory Mapping.

As seen above, researchers advocate a pattern being used to help prior learning and Memory Mapping provides just such a pattern.

Memory Mapping is a really clear way to take ideas and facts off a page and put them in an easy to remember form.

Your children will see how ideas all connect together in the pattern and they will remember them.

By taking facts and ideas from books and putting them into a Memory Map your children will learn and remember. As an example see below a completed Memory Map that we use to explain about Memory Mapping. This Map has printed words and images which you can also do for your maps or if you wish you or your children can create your memory maps by hand:

You and your children can use Memory Mapping for prior learning just about anything that will be part of their future school work.

The great thing about Memory Maps is that there does not need to be a great deal of writing which takes up lots of time. The Memory Map uses only a few words, images, color, and location to help your children remember.

The Memory Map then helps your children speak about a subject. If they can speak about it, then they know it, and they will have gained the early experience of the subjects they will be learning later in school. This will give them that vital head start making their formal education activities so much easier for them.

Nature magazine published this conclusion as far back as 1983 stating that REM sleep was required to enable the brain to process the information and the experiences of the day.

Without this sleep the brain was unable to delete superfluous information and pathways and would therefore be less capable of remembering and learning.

This is a very important message for the quality of children’s learning. What about during vacations and holiday times?

The obvious thing to do to give your children the best chance when learning, is to make sure that they get plenty of sleep and this means during vacation and holiday times as well.

During vacation and holiday periods the temptation is to let the kids stay up late and the pressure from the kids themselves to stay up late is there as well.

However, these times away from school are great opportunities for learning whilst at the same time having a lot of fun doing so. 

To give the best chance of learning during vacations; the thing to do is therefore to have them go to bed at their normal school bed time.

I’ll bet that if they do, your kids will be set up for the day and more likely to learn well. Of course on some occasions it’s great to have them stay up late, why not let both them and you have a treat sometimes.

This suggests that for learners the best time of the day may vary depending on the person and that effective learning for an individual will vary accordingly.

But what does the research say about the best time of the day for learning? Some research says that we learn better at different times of the day. For example, R Thayer suggests that effective learning is best carried out in the late morning and early evening. As a parent need you concern yourself with this?

Well, as a parent working with your children and helping them with their learning this is something to bear in mind. Our advice is to see and hear at what time in the day your children perform best at their learning and try to fit in with this to get the best effort from them. This will lead to better and more effective learning.

The time of day factor is something that parents need to be particularly aware of during vacation and holidays from school. Do your children learn best in the late morning and early evening as Thayer suggests or at some other time? What does your research with your children conclude?  When in the day does your children’s effective learning occur?

The thing is to – “do what works”.

Whatever time of day is best for your children make it fun and they are much more likely to be motivated and to retain what they have learned and to undertake real and effective learning.