How to Teach Your Toddler to Memorize

Whether it's the Pledge of Allegiance, the Girl Scouts' Pledge, or Bible verses, your child will be expected to memorize during childhood. Learning the art of memorization at a young age will help your children to be successful in high school and post graduate studies as they study for quizzes and exams.

There are several ways you can help your child master memorization techniques. We began to work with our child at the age of two to memorize Bible verses. We started with John 3:16. If you are not familiar with the verse:

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

At first I thought perhaps the verse was too long for him to learn at such a young age, but to my surprise, after working on it for about a week, he had it down, King James English and all. Here are a few tips we have used for teaching our children to memorize:

Start Young
Little children absorb information at an astounding rate. At the age of two your child is adding words to his vocabulary every day. He is learning sounds, colors, letters, numbers, patterns, etc. This is a great time to encourage the multiplication of those little brain cells by teaching him to commit words to memory.

Use Repetition
Young children learn words and phrases primarily by repetition. You can easily observe this when your child is playing and uses several sentences that he learned from you. You never told him to memorize "We need to play nicely together", but you saying it a few times a day planted the words in his mind. Say the statement, verse, or pledge to your child, one phrase at a time. Say it slowly and deliberately. After you say it a couple of times, say the beginning of the phrase, leaving out the last word. Your child will probably quickly learn to supply the missing word. Soon you will be able to leave out prepositional phrases and nouns and your child will pick up on those as well.

Be Consistent
We taught our son John 3:16 simply by working on it twice a day for about a week. We usually worked on it once in the car during the day, and once before bed at night. Morning is also a great time to work on the mental discipline of memorization, because their minds are most alert after a good night's rest and healthy breakfast. Don't work on it for two days, then skip a week, and expect to pick up where you left off.

Use Voice Inflection
Make certain words stand out by inflecting your voice to place emphasis. Key words should be said articulately. You can intone your voice up or down at the end of a phrase. These verbal cues will remind your child of the words when he is saying the passage. When your child commits something to memory, he will connect the intonation you used to the words to help him remember.

Use Music
Though you may think you're a rotten memorizer, you likely have scores of songs memorized. Why is that? Because music is a catchy way of remembering things. Set the words to a familiar song tune such as "The Farmer and the Dell" or "Amazing Grace". You might be surprised how quickly your child picks up on it.

Offer Incentives
As always, you should affirm and encourage your child as he learns. Praise him or even offer a small reward for memorizing. It's hard work to commit words to memory, so you should congratulate him for running this mental mile.

Teaching your child to memorize will contribute to his mental development. By starting young, using repetition, inflection and incentives, you will help prepare your child for greater success in school and life.