Tips and Tricks to Strengthen Working Memory in Math

Of all of the executive functioning skills required to succeed in mathematics, working memory may be one of the most important! Working memory refers to how the brain uses, holds, processes and manipulates the information stored in our short-term memory. Working memory allows us to plan, problem solve and reason, all of which go hand-in-hand with the necessary skills to complete a math problem. Let’s dive into some tips and tricks which can help to strengthen working memory, specifically in relation to the world of math!

Play Games

There are many popular games that can be played as a family that utilize working memory. Games like Concentration, Uno, Crazy Eights and Go Fish all require the players to use their working memory system. Simon Says, Follow the Beat, Tongue Twisters, puzzles and brain teasers are other excellent examples of activities that can be used to strengthen working memory. In many of these activities, our brains must actively recall information, and in-turn manipulate it to make the next move!

Put Your Child in the Teacher Role

When working through a new math concept, once a child has begun to master the concept at hand, they should attempt to teach someone else how to do it. When the child becomes the teacher, they are switching into a more active role and thus enhancing their working memory skills. For example, if a child is working on adding fractions with a different denominator, they should be able to walk someone else through each step necessary to solve this kind of problem and explain the “why” behind it.

Practice Every Day

For things like math facts (simple and quick math problems across the four operations), practicing every day can help to reduce the strain on working memory capacity. The more automatic these quick facts become, the more space is freed up in the brain to utilize other math skills and solve larger and more complex mathematical equations and word problems.

Visualize

When working on word problems, it is best to come up with various visualization strategies that can be used to solve each problem. Examples of visualization strategies in math might be drawing an array, making pictures or using math manipulatives.

Make a Plan

A great general rule of thumb for math problems (especially those tricky word problems) is to NEVER leave math in your head. This means write down as much as possible. Circle, underline or highlight the key words in a math problem and then make a plan to solve. Write out each step as a number sentence, and use the visualization tools mentioned above to help solve the problem.

Practice Yoga & Mindfulness

Research has shown activities like yoga and mindfulness can improve working memory. Both of these practices aim to draw our attention to how and when our mind wanders, which in turn can help increase focus and the working memory function of the brain. There are many wonderful YouTube channels for kids yoga, such as Cosmic Yoga that can be completed daily. Alternately, try simple breathing exercises in the car on the way to school as a way to practice mindfulness each day.

Use Mnemonics and Songs

Making a mnemonic device or turning something that needs to be memorized into a song are two more fantastic ways to strengthen working memory. The most famous mnemonics device in Math is PEMDAS with “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” as the words to remember the order of operations. There are also fun and silly songs on YouTube to help learn and memorize math facts. Putting information into a catchy song allows our brain to more easily store and remember it!

Written by Laine J.

Simple and Fun Ways to Incorporate Math Skills during Summer Vacation

Taking two months off from essential math and computation skills can be worrisome for many parents of little ones. After all, many math skills build upon each other and require year round practice to not fall behind or forget important facts. Luckily, there are many fun and unique ways to incorporate math skills into summer break and help your child reinforce the skills they have been working on all year long in school.

Acknowledge and Work on Math in Real World Situations

One of the simplest ways to use math during the summer is to point out all of the times in everyday life that we use math skills, perhaps without even realizing it! If your child is working on ratios, fractions or division, invite them to make a recipe with you from start to finish. Going through a recipe together is a great way to strengthen understanding of all of those skills. Another example might be having your child start to notice how much items cost at places like restaurants or grocery stores and use basic computation skills to tally up totals or how much change they might need. Lastly, try giving a back-to-school shopping allowance to your child and tell them they need to buy a certain number of items with the set amount of money you gave them. This activity is fun and puts real world problem solving and computation skills to work!

Make it an Experience

Another way to use math in summer is to come up with experiences that rely heavily on certain math skills. Things like garage sales, lemonade stands or bake sales are perfect examples! Children can calculate how much they need to spend to buy the items for the sale, how much they’re going to charge for each item and (depending on their age) can even start working on concepts like how much profit they are making.

Keeping Score

Family game night is another scenario where math skills can be reinforced. Games like Sudoku, Set, Monopoly, Connect 4 and many more help with math computation skills as well as problem solving skills. There are also endless card games that can be used to work with math concepts.

Apps and Games for Basic Reinforcement

Finally, to make sure your child does not lose their math facts, try to find a fun app or game that can be used to do a daily 10-15 minutes of math facts practice every day!

Written by Laine J.

How to Make Summer Reading Enjoyable for Your Child

“I have to read?!?! But it’s summer!!” Can’t you just hear kids all over the country saying this when they find out that reading is still a part of summer break? Sure, some kids LOVE to read but for others, especially beginning readers, it can be hard to motivate them to want to sit down and pick up a book. Summer can be a great time to introduce some fun and engaging ways to make reading more enjoyable for your emerging reader! 

Create a Fun Reading Environment

After spending the year in a classroom reading at a desk each day, it’s time to change things up a little bit. Try to make reading a “special” event by creating a new reading environment. This might include building a pillow and blanket fort or putting up a tent, grabbing some flashlights and getting cozy with a book. Another idea is getting some fresh air. Head to the park with a picnic and a few new books and spend the afternoon snacking and reading. Changing up the environment might be just the thing your reader needs to kick start their summer reading! 

Take a Trip to the Library 

Throughout the summer, take a few trips to the library to refresh reading material. Ask your child what kinds of things they might like to read about and help them find this at the library. Some kids enjoy more non-fiction magazines and research books, while others enjoy fiction or picture books. The library will have all sorts of new books they have never seen before and will entice them to pick up a new book and get reading.  

Think Outside of the Box

Reading doesn’t just have to be in a book! Your child can practice reading in a lot of other ways too. Find new items your child might able to read like street signs, menus, magazines or fun reading apps. Practice is still practice, and as an added bonus your child will be so proud when they find out they can read things out in the real world that they might not have ever tried or been able to before. 

Build it into the Routine 

Sure, summer is all about having unstructured time, vacations, relaxing and getting a break. But, children still thrive with some routine and structure. Try to build in some reading time at the same time each day. Perhaps after lunch, during quiet time you can have your child sit and read for 10- 30 minutes a day. By making it part of the daily routine, there may be fewer battles to get the reading done. 

Read to Someone New 

Have your child try reading to someone new like grandma or grandpa, siblings, the family pet or even their stuffed animals. This takes some of the pressure off and allows them to be more relaxed with their reading. If you are reading with your child, try taking turns and having them read a page and you read a page so that they also get practice hearing fluency. 

Use a Simple Incentives System 

If your little one is really opposed to summer reading, it can be helpful to introduce some incentives, or rewards, for getting their reading done. Come up with a goal for either how many minutes per day or how many books in a week that they must read. Maybe they get a small weekly reward like a trip to the ice cream shop or little toy every time they hit their reading goal. For older kiddos, it might be helpful to have a larger monthly goal for the summer with a bigger reward to look forward to if they reach their goal like a day trip or a shopping spree before the new school year!

Written by: Laine J.

Reflecting on and Celebrating Big Accomplishments from the School Year

As the school year winds down and comes to a close, now is the perfect time to do some reflecting and some celebrating! Looking back on the year’s biggest successes is a wonderful way to strengthen the executive skill of metacognition and continue the upward momentum into the summer and next school year. It is very important to celebrate a students’ successes no matter how big or small for a variety of reasons. This positive reinforcement provides motivation, builds confidence, acknowledges their effort and ultimately reinforces and strengthens the better habits they’ve worked so hard to build all year long. 

Let’s start with reflecting upon the year as a whole. Hopefully, at the beginning of the school year, or at the start of each semester, you and your child created some specific and measurable goals. Examples of goals you may have set throughout the school year might be: getting all A’s in each course taken, arriving to school on time every day, only having one missed homework assignment per month, or remembering to check off a daily planner. Take a look at whether these goals were met either month by month or each semester and hopefully you will see progress in some, or all, of the goals set throughout the year! It could be worthwhile to create a chart or graph as a visual way to show the progress made. Try to highlight all the positives, make a note of what went right and what strategies worked the best so you can continue those into the next school year! If some goals weren’t met, those can be moved to the top of the priority list for the upcoming school year. 

Let’s celebrate! It’s possible you already had an incentive system in place when certain goals were reached throughout the school year. Now may be a good time to look at the progress made for the year as a whole and pick out an extra special way to celebrate. Experiences are a great option for celebrating accomplishments since they are so memorable. Perhaps you can plan a special family dinner out, a staycation or day trip, or a shopping spree to your child’s favorite store! Acknowledging your child’s successes throughout the school year in a unique and personal way goes a long way toward sustaining the skills they have worked so hard on all year long and helping them to see that it is worth it to continue to build upon these skills and strategies into the future. 

Written by: Laine J.

Five Strategies to Help Boost Reading Comprehension

One of the most fundamental academic skills all children must learn is that of reading comprehension. In its most basic sense, reading comprehension involves understanding and interpreting what is read. Reading comprehension is a vital skill which can be used across all subjects, not just language arts. Improving reading comprehension unlocks a better understanding of word problems, research and non-fiction texts. So, let’s dive into five strategies to help boost a student’s reading comprehension that can be implemented every day! 

1. Preview the text: Often, young readers will dive into a text without thinking much about what they are about to read. It can be extremely beneficial to preview a text before reading it and answer a few key questions. Firstly, identify what type of text is about to be read. Is it fiction or non-fiction? Was it written to teach us about something or to be entertaining? Knowing the category a certain text falls into can be helpful to understand before reading the text and lead to better comprehension of the passage. Secondly, identify any unknown words or text features and discuss them prior to reading the passage.

2. Gain New Vocabulary: One thing that holds many young readers back from fully understanding and being able to interpret a passage is their lack of knowledge about new vocabulary. Even if a child can literally read each word, if they cannot understand key vocabulary they will also struggle to understand the passage. A helpful strategy to help with vocabulary would be to go through the entire passage and ask your child to tell you each word that they don’t already know the meaning of. They can make a list of these new words and then you can work together to find definitions. You could then make flashcards or a matching game with the vocabulary words to help your child learn them.

3. Generate Questions: If you are reading aloud with your child, which is highly recommended for all new readers especially, be sure to stop every few minutes and ask questions directly related to what you just read. Some examples might be, “what do you think is going to happen next,” or “wait, on the last page where did Jimmy go again?”. Often times, young readers will be so focused on just reading the words correctly and with fluency that they don’t slow down to internalize what just happened in the story. Stopping every once and awhile and briefly discussing key characters and events will help consolidate the information being read.

4. Summarize: After each chapter or section of a text, practice summarizing. This could be done aloud or written down. What were the most important things that happened in this passage? Who were the key characters? Work on helping your child to summarize only the most important events and to do so in the sequence in which they occurred in the story.

5. Find Evidence: Students need to not only be able to answer more simple questions regarding a text (i.e. setting, characters, sequence of events), but they also need to be able to answer more higher level questions and use evidence directly from the text to back up their answers. Some questions you might be able to ask would be “In the last chapter, Jimmy was feeling nervous. Find me a sentence that shows that Jimmy was feeling nervous.” Underlining, highlighting or pointing out the specific sentence that shows the answer from the text is another key skill to improve upon reading comprehension especially in the context of test taking skills.

Written by: Laine J.

Metacognition: Reflecting Upon First Semester and Setting Goals and Rewards for the Second

The start of a new year is an excellent time to both do some self-reflection on the past semester and look ahead at the upcoming semester. One of the key executive functioning skills, metacognition, is essential in doing both of those things. Metacognition, in its most basic definition, is the act of thinking about thinking. Sounds simple, but in reality it is one of the hardest skills to strengthen because we often just don’t take the time to sit down and think about what went wrong and what went right and why. However, if we can improve this self-regulatory process we can begin to strengthen all of our other executive skills because they all work interdependently. So, let’s take a look at what it means to reflect on the past semester and set goals and rewards for the second semester!

Helpful strategies when reflecting on the previous semester: 

• Be Specific: When we begin to “reflect” on the past semester, it is important to be as specific as possible. Hopefully, you had some goals previously set that were measurable. For example, your child’s goal might have been “turning in all homework assignments on time with no more than one missed assignment per week.” Now is the time to go in and see if this goal was met and how often it was met. If possible, giving a percentage here is helpful (i.e. this goal was met 80 percent of the time).

• Open Discussion: After looking as specifically as possible at previous goals or grades from the last semester, spend some time discussing what went wrong and what went right. It can be helpful to do this for each class individually, especially if there are one or two classes that goals were or were not met in. For a class where goals were met, ask questions like, “What were some things you felt helped you the most to stay on track in this class,” or “What do you feel you did really well in this class?” For classes where goals were not met, it may be helpful to ask questions like, “Can you tell me what the hardest aspects of this class are,” or “What are some things that you felt you struggled with in this class?” Jot these things down and spend some time discussing strategies to adjust or improve in each area!

• Future Planning: Once we have identified the successes and areas for improvement from the past semester, we can better plan realistic goals and rewards for the semester ahead.

Setting New Goals and Rewards

• Setting New Goals: January is naturally a great time to look ahead at the remainder of this school year and either make new goals or adjust previously set ones. Let’s say in the previous semester your child had a goal of turning in all homework assignments on time with no more than 2 missed assignments per month and they did this 90 plus percent of the time. Now may be a good time to adjust this goal to “completing all homework assignments on time with only 1 or no missed assignments per month”. If a goal is consistently being met (85 percent or more of the time) it would be good to either adjust it to strengthen it more, or possibly look to see if there’s another area that could be worked on instead.

• Defining Rewards: Rewards can be extremely beneficial in all scenarios but especially if many of the goals from the previous semester haven’t been met. Let’s go back to the goal of completing all homework assignments per month with two or fewer missed. If this goal was only being met 50 percent of the time, now may be a good time to add a reward in for reaching this goal. It is good to offer a mix of smaller attainable rewards and then possibly a larger reward. In the scenario of turning all homework assignments in on time, there could be a weekly, or even daily, small reward for turning work in and a larger reward to look forward to if the month-long goal is met. It’s great to discuss with your child what rewards are most interesting or exciting to them and work together to come up with an incentive plan as the new semester begins!

Written by: Laine J.

Self Regulation and Emotional Control: 5 Tips and Tools to Use at Any Age when Stress Gets High

We’ve all been there… the work has piled up, there isn’t enough time to complete everything and anything that can go wrong does. Yes, life can be full of stressful situations no matter who you are or what age! A key life skill is our ability to handle our emotions and self-regulate even at times where it may seem impossible. Self- regulation and emotional control are skills that most of us are, in fact, still developing each and every day. Similarly to how we strengthen our bodies at the gym, we must also practice our tools to de-stress and self-regulate on a regular basis. Below are five tools and tips to help improve these vital executive functioning skills at any age. 

1. Mindfulness and Breathing Exercises: Mindfulness and breathing exercises can be some of the most beneficial tools to work on our emotional control and handle all that life throws at us. The key is to practice them on a daily basis, not just when things get hard. Think of it this way, a professional athlete spends an enormous amount of time training for the big day, they don’t just show up at the game and expect to be good. Our minds work the same way. For younger children, the ‘take five’ breathing exercise is a great strategy for calming down. Have your child hold up their hand and trace each finger breathing in as they go up the finger and out as they go down. For older kids and adults, the 4-7-8 is an excellent breathing exercise to use daily. Breathe in through your nose for a count of four, hold at the top for 7 seconds and breathe out for a count of 8. Repeat this four times. By making these exercises a part of your daily routine now, you can have them in your toolkit when stress gets high.

2. Movement: The benefits of regular physical activity cannot be stressed enough. When we exercise our body gets endorphins, and as Elle Woods says it, endorphins make us happy. It is great to try to incorporate movement a little each day, but especially when life gets chaotic it is more beneficial than ever to stop, take a break and get some physical activity. Going for a walk or bike ride, doing twenty minutes of yoga, or having a ten-minute dance party break for the little ones (and little ones at heart) can all be excellent brain breaks and give us what we need when we are having trouble regulating our emotions.

3. Create a Calm Down Kit: When we feel stressed, we often want to be comforted. A great idea to help with this is to create a basket or kit that can help us calm down and feel at peace during these times. For little ones, the basket might include a stuffed animal, a fidget toy or small puzzle, a book of yoga cards, a sensory jar or play dough. For older kids, a calm down kit might include headphones for listening to your favorite music, a comforting snack, a mindful coloring book, a warm blanket or pillow, a candle or anything else that brings us the feeling of peace that we crave during times of stress.

4. Change up the Routine: If your child all of the sudden has a bunch of projects, multiple homework assignments and a test due in two days, cue the stress and emotional overload. A simple tool that can help is to change up your routine. This might mean working in a new environment like outside or at a coffee shop. Another option is to alternate the harder tasks with something different and fun— perhaps an activity in your calm down basket or a quick trip to get some ice cream!

5. Nourish Your Body: When we get stressed, we tend to forget about self-care and that impacts our ability to self-regulate and control our emotions. Make sure to drink extra water, eat whole foods, get plenty of sleep and exercise. We can also nourish our minds by doing something creative like a craft, spending time with family and friends, or watching a funny show or movie to give a good old dose of laughter.

Written by: Laine J.