Help Your Baby Learn

To make your smart baby super smart, make your home a classroom of learning and teaching. More importantly, make it safe and secure for your baby. You teach, and your baby learns; as you teach, you yourself also learn. Learning to teach and teaching to learn is a unique lifetime experience for both the parents and their children.

Your Baby’s Brain

At birth, a baby’s brain weighs approximately 25 percent of that of an adult. At six months, it may increase to 50 percent. At one year, a baby’s brain may develop to 70 percent or more of that of an adult. At around three years, a baby’s brain may become fully developed. As the baby’ brain develops, the baby learns; the more it learns, the faster the brain develops. Therefore, make the most out of the first three years to maximize your baby’s brain development for a smarter baby.

Through learning and teaching, you can enhance and accelerate the growth of your baby’s brain. A baby’s initial body movements are based on reflexes, which can be quickly replaced by voluntary, intentional movements as soon as its trillions of brain cells begin to develop and mature. As a result, the first few years are particularly vital to the development of brain cells, providing the groundwork for intelligence.

Learning and Remembering

Learning is a process of perceiving and understanding information received by the brain. But information is useless and irrelevant unless it is easily and readily available and retrievable; in other words, information must be remembered and properly stored as memories in different compartments of the brain, which are like file cabinets in the human brain.

The Different Memory Techniques

In order for information to be properly stored by the brain, it must be experienced through its five sensory organs. Most learning involves one of three primary techniques:

• Visual memory involves seeing, such as studying a map or an illustration. Visual-memory learning is faster with greater confidence.
•  Auditory memory involves hearing, such as listening to a song or lecture. Auditory-memory learning enhances the compartmentalization of complex materials.
• Kinesthetic memory involves doing, such as brushing teeth or swimming. Kinesthetic-memory learning is more enduring because it is more automatic and spontaneous.

These memory techniques are critical to learning. Many of us are more efficient at one type of memory than another; for example, most of us learn best by using visual memory than by using auditory or kinesthetic memory. Having said that, if you wish your baby to have exceptional memories, develop his skills and proficiency in all memory techniques.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau