Misapplied Memory

Never one to let her older brother have anything over her, the lass has decided she wants to read. Actually, this state of affairs has existed since before the Summer began. Without the constant distraction of going to school; however, the situation has intensified.

So we’ve purchased flash cards to help her memorize some of the common simple words like ‘of’, ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘are’, and so forth. She’s going to be learning these words as part of kindergarten this year, so she’ll just be ahead of the game a bit.

While going through some of the cards the other night, I thought I noticed something. After the first time through, she seemed to be predicting the next word. The giveaway was when she didn’t look at a card and managed to recite it. She had memorized the word order. Or come pretty close.

So I switched gears and did my best to pull randomly from the stack. Her focus shifted back towards looking at the words. But then another complication arose.

The cards all have a word on the back and the front; in some cases I would show her both words because I judged them appropriate for her. One example is ‘for’ and ‘get’. An easy one to remember.

Turns out she also started picking up the word pairs. So again she’d tilted a temporary advantage. I started using multiple cards and not showing the second sides to navigate around this particular adaptation of hers.

After the 3rd time through, I felt she’d done well enough so I handed her the cards and started asking her to hand back to me individual cards with a particular word on them. I started her out easy going with ‘the’ and ‘a’.

And that’s when she revealed a third trick that I hadn’t picked up on. The words on the cards are different colors. For instance, ‘the’ is printed in orange while ‘it’ is printed in green. She’d memorized the colors of the different words and used it as a cue to eliminate certain words from the realm of possibilities.

The other thing she did, which her brother did and still does to a degree, is look at the first letter in the word and make a guess. For instance, she never missed the word ‘the’ after the first time through. My suspicion is she noticed that the only flash card word that started with the letter ‘t’ was ‘the’ so she’d use that as her cue to say the word.

So that’s 4 different things she memorized, as opposed to just memorizing the words themselves.

This is what I’m up against.