As a primary school teacher for more than 20 years I am all too familiar with the huge amount of curriculum content we need to teach our young charges. On top of this we also need to find time to teach the additional “soft skills”. The skills of sharing, cooperation, teamwork, resilience, being a gracious loser and an even more gracious winner, perseverance and the joy of developing a skill through practice and the best way to teach these skills is through games.
This article is all about the Memory games you will find on the Learn From Play website. Why it is good for young children and where you can find it to play today. Known as Memory, Concentration or “Match Up” this game requires players to turn pairs of cards to try to find matching cards. Just one of the three games you will find for each book this game is designed to provide children with an opportunity to improve their memory, analytical and thinking skills.
Requiring an increasing level of visual memory as the number of cards increase Match Up also teaches image discrimination, sorting and patterning which are important in developing problem-solving skills.
The Match Up or Memory card game is able to be completed individually or alone and opens in a new tab to ensure ease of returning to the book activities later. Each game starts easily with just 4 cards, this increases to 6, 8, 10, 12, in progressive rounds with a score given based on the number of cards matched and the speed at which this is completed. The cards shuffle their position each time to ensure children don’t just remember the previous game.
Students work against the clock to match the cards as quickly as possible to attain the highest score and, as an additional maths lesson, could graph their score over a period of time to see their increase in speed at completing this game and their increased ability to remember short term information.
Students have the option of having the sound on or off for ease of concentration. Multiple students can play this game simultaneous for extra fun learning without even realising there are lessons being taught and skills being mastered – the exact reason we gamify teaching at Learn From Play.
There are almost 100 versions of the Memory card game on Learn From Play as we have custom created this for every one of the books on the site. I am sure with so many to choose from your children are bound to find one they love.
When they do please let me know which game they enjoy the most and which games you would like to see us include in the future. We are contemplating adding a find-a-word game but would love to hear from you if there are other games that would benefit you and your children more.
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