What Was There? A Classic Memory Game

What You Do:

1. Select 15-20 small items and arrange them on the tray or baking sheet. Do not let your child see the items. Feel free to increase or decrease the total item number according to your child's ability.
2. Cover the items completely with a large cloth.
3. Explain the game to your child. His job is to remember the items on the tray as best he can after studying them for 20 seconds. Before starting, you can talk about suggestions for remembering the items, such as visualizing a silly story in which the items are used.
4. When he's ready, uncover the tray and keep track of the viewing time. Quickly recover the tray and remove it from view.
5. Give your child one minute to recall as many of the items as he can. Keep track of what he remembers with the pen and paper.

Variations:

1. Play competitively. Add more players to the mix. The one who can recall the most items on the tray wins!
2. Reduce the amount of total items on the tray to ten. Let your child view the uncovered items for 15 seconds. Take the tray into another room and remove one item. Bring the tray back into the room and uncover it. Have your child guess which item is missing.
3. Choose only items representing one letter of the alphabet. This is especially helpful if your preschooler or kindergartener is studying a “letter of the week”.
4. Support foreign language vocabulary. Practice speaking foreign languages by having your child recall the names of items in a language other than English.