Consolidate

How your child consolidates their learning

Have you ever noticed that your child knows or ‘gets’ something one day and then it’s gone? That suggests a lack of consolidation. Consolidation is needed to make learning more easily accessed, useful and permanent.

Practice helps consolidation

Practice helps shift new learning from temporary to long term memory. This is where there is a shift from learning processes requiring effort and working memory in the front of the brain, to more automatic thinking supported by brain regions further back. Practice doesn't just make perfect, it also makes learning easier to access and more permanent.

Practice should be more than your child just repeating something. Applying knowledge (especially in new situations), linking between different representations of it, enacting it, discussing it or expressing it in new forms, all help us store knowledge in different ways.

Sleep

Finally, an essential part of consolidation is sleep. During the day, new learning will generate new patterns of brain activity in your child’s brain (specifically the cortex). At night, during a deep stage of sleep, your child’s brain replays those patterns, helping the memory of the learning become more distributed and more permanently stored in the cortex. Last night’s sleep is not just important for your child feeling ready, refreshed and rested so that they can learn today, it’s also necessary for them to keep hold of what was learnt yesterday. This means lost or disrupted sleep can have a doubly negative effect on learning. This is one reason why it’s important for a child to maintain a daily structure during the pandemic, with regular waking times, learning sessions and bedtimes.

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