Memory games for children: practising working memory through play

Working memory keeps information available in your mind for a short time so that you can work with it. It is more than simple short-term memory: you do not just hold on to information, you also rearrange it, calculate with it or update what you have memorised. Children need it, for example, for mental arithmetic or when they have to keep an instruction with several steps in mind. In Spooky Stairs, players have to know where their own figure is hiding after the ghosts have swapped places.

Simple memory games are available for children from age 4. Even very young children can hold on to something briefly; keeping several things in mind at once and changing them, by contrast, develops slowly and continues to mature into adolescence. In this selection, Spooky Stairs and My First BrainBox are recommended from age 4, My First Stone Age from age 5 and Rat-a-Tat Cat from age 6. Publishers recommend games in which what you have memorised keeps changing, such as Cabo Deluxe Edition, That's not a Hat! or Hanabi, from age 8.

Nobody can promise that. It is true that executive functions, which include working memory, are linked to reading and arithmetic performance. However, a meta-analysis of working memory training programmes found mainly short-term gains on similar memory tasks; these did not convincingly transfer to arithmetic or word reading. Memory games are therefore above all a lovely opportunity to play together and practise remembering along the way, not a learning programme.

Make the task smaller: start with a game from a younger age group, or play as a team at first, with child and adult together. A good game challenges children without overwhelming them and only gets harder gradually. Pay attention to the moment, too: when a child is short of sleep or stressed, these are exactly the skills that suffer first. Playing should be fun and not feel like a test.