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.

“It’s not what I do. I simply do not have the knowledge to be a teacher to my children, it’s not part of my identity, and I leave all that to the teachers”.

This view that many a parent has was emphasised to me the other night when I was at a public speaking workshop. Here is what happened.

A friend of mine, Angela, stood before the assembled audience and asked them:

How many of you here tonight are a parent?

What was the answer? Well, hands shot up for about 80% of the people there.

How many of you here are a teacher?

The answer, just one lone hand went up, from a man in the back.

Another question from Angela ; Sir, and how are you a teacher?

The answer from the man in the back; “I am a teacher because I am a parent”.

Perhaps you will not be surprised to hear that I was the man in the back.

In fact as a parent you are ideally placed to help your children learn and to be their teacher. Compared to your children with all your years of experience, no matter what your educational level, you are already an expert.

Do you believe this? It’s true. It can be part of your identity; it can be part of what you are, part of who you are and part of what you do.

You can be a teacher because you are already an expert. Believe it!

He concludes that if you don’t use your brain then its powers could diminish, so to help avoid this you need to keep your brain active.

One interesting observation he made was that retired farm workers were more than twice as likely as retired farm managers to become mentally impaired as they got older. The workers were considered to have had less intellectually challenging jobs than the managers and that this was the cause of the difference.

And what is the moral of the story?  Well, the way to keep mentally alert is to do things that challenge you intellectually, to keep your brain active.  How?

There are many things you could do and one of them is to use Memory Maps for learning and remembering the things that you are interested in, or perhaps you have to learn as part of a course or for work.

Memory Maps use a combination of location, words, images, and colour, even sound and moving visuals to help you learn, memorise and keep you intellectually challenged and your brain stimulated. Below is an example of a completed Memory Map the subject of which is how to do memory maps:   

So our advice is to keep your brain active all your life and try Memory Mapping, it’s easy to use for learning, remembering and helping you to speak about a subject!

See the articles on this Blog and our free reports to find out more about Memory Mapping and the detail of how it all works. 

When you are helping your children to learn, the moral of the tale is to get them laughing, telling jokes, having fun, and that way your children will more easily succeed in their learning and at school.

Happy children are motivated, stressed children do not want to learn.

So how can you help your children with their learning and give them a good time and make it fun?

Essentially we suggest that you as the parent take part in collaborative learning with your children, having a lot of fun whilst doing so.

On our Blogs you will find tips, techniques, and methods of how to do this to help you greatly improve your children’s abilities and learning.

The children who have teachers, who are happy, funny, smile, grin and who love their work, do much better than children who do not have such wonderful teachers.Are you really surprised? No? I thought not,and nor were we when we read about this.The question that arises is this.

Is there a lesson in this for parents?

Well, the advice to teachers prior to teaching is therefore to get in a good mood,de-stress, and be prepared to use material that is humorous and fun, that way their students are more likely to do better.

So what lesson is there from the world of teaching for you parents?

Yes, you’ve got it! When you are helping your children to learn, do it in a fun and happy way and your children will do a lot better.

So, as is said in my home country, England, “have a laugh”. Have a laugh with your children and get involved with their activities.

At ‘The Learning Well’ we say something similar – “make it fun, then you’ve won”.

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.

To say this in another way; when teachers expect children to do well in school that is what they do and when teachers do not expect them to do well they do not do so well.

This is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy and is known as the ‘Pygmalion Effect’.

In the world of education the effect was discovered by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson and set out in their book ‘Pygmalion in the classroom’.

In their study teachers were told that a class had very intelligent students and that the teachers had to make sure that they were stretched. Though these were ‘ordinary’ school students they achieved brilliant results.

Why?

Because these school students came to believe that they were the best and this belief motivated them to achieve at a higher level.

Anthony Robbins says that “what we consider possible or impossible is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.”

If you believe you are something you will take action on that belief.

If you believe you are a dancer, not just that you can dance, then you will dance. If you believe that you are a mountaineer you will take action and climb mountains.

If a child believes “I am intelligent and good at schoolwork” then he or she will do far, far, better at school.

So, does this have a lesson for you as a parent concerned over your child’s education? We think it does.

If you have high expectations of your children then they will do better in school work.

If you give your child the belief that they are intelligent then they will absorb this belief and act accordingly. How can you do this in a practical sense?

Rather than intelligence being narrowly defined as it used to be, intelligence is now viewed as being the product of multiple intelligences.

If your child is not so great at written work, are they better at speaking, do they come up with fantastically creative stories? Praise them and tell them that they are intelligent. Are they not so good at maths at school but good at singing, clapping, playing an instrument? Praise them and tell them that they are intelligent.

The spin off will be that your child will believe that they are intelligent, it will become part of who they believe they are and they will act accordingly and you will find that this belief has a positive impact on those areas of your child’s school work that they may not doing as well as they could be.

Your child’s belief that they are intelligent will raise their performance in all areas of school life as they act on that belief.

You can help your children learn outside the classroom, you therefore can be a teacher to your children.

Anthony Robbins says that;

“what we consider possible or impossible is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.”

Have you said to yourself I can’t do that, or that’s just not me or that would be impossible to do?

If so you have, as Robbins says;

“run up against the barriers of a limited identity”.

You have confined what you are able to do within certain boundaries because you see yourself as not being able to do something, it has become what you are and it has become part of your identity. Is this ok?

This is fine if you are dealing with something that is bad or just plain wrong. For example if you say to yourself “I’m not a car thief, that’s just not me”.

But what happens if you believe you are not something or can’t do something which if you could, would be of benefit to you and to others. What if you believe that you cannot help your children learn, if you believe that you cannot be a teacher to them?

In this case the world has lost something special.

And if you do believe that you, a parent, are also a teacher, if you expand your boundaries and being a teacher becomes part of your identity, what then?

Well, you and your children will have gained something really special.

Our Blog, and the other Learning Well Blogs, is here to help you and to  help you help your children. Please feel free to look at the other articles and to download our free reports.

The left side of the brain is thought to be the logical half processing information sequentially in parts. The right side of the brain is said to be the creative side processing in ‘wholes’.

This understanding has led to an industry of commentators who have categorised people as predominantly ‘left brained’ or ‘right brained’, often saying that one is better than the other, if you like that one learning resource is better than the other. Is this the correct view and how does the answer matter to you personally and as a parent?

Well, other researchers now say that this is too limited a way of thinking about the brain and that human capability and learning does not fall neatly into left brain and right brain activity.  For example J Levy says that the two halves are involved in almost everything that people do.

To quote Eric Jenson;

“Each side of the brain relies on the other and each is part of a larger “whole” …… Both parts and wholes are important to learning ….. those who are promoting ‘right brain thinking’ might do more good by promoting ‘whole brain thinking’.

So how can you apply whole brain thinking to help you and your children with life and with learning?

A brilliant and practical method of applying whole brain thinking is to use Memory Mapping. 

The Learning Well encourages the use of Memory Mapping as it provides one of the very best whole brain learning experiences that makes use of all the learning resource that is the brain.

A Memory Map combines logic, sequence, and creativity to enable accelerated learning that can be very easily remembered.

Using this technique can make a huge difference to you personally and also to your children greatly enhancing their abilities and learning.

We thoroughly recommend the use of Memory Mapping to you and you are invited to learn about it from the resources available to you on this Blog including our free reports. Mapping will make a huge difference to your life and that of your children enhancing their learning and yours.