How To Teach Children To Remember Their Phone Number

As a responsible
parent, you probably want to make sure that you teach your child to be able
to recite your home phone number as early as you possibly can. While we would
all like to hope that our children will never have any occasion to need to use
their home phone number, we also want to err on the side of caution in making
sure that our children are kept safe.

Knowing how to call home in case of an emergency or an accidental separation
from us in a public place is a critical part of keeping our children safe. But
how soon is too soon to teach children to remember their phone numbers? And
how do you go about teaching this to them?

The best way to help your
child first start to learn your phone number is to make the process of learning
it into a game or song. By putting a melody to the recitation of the phone number
– in the same way that we all have a familiar melody for reciting the
ABCs – you can make it easier for your child’s memory to be jogged
about what the phone number is. This makes learning it easier since it’s
a long number for a young child to remember without this extra help.

Teaching your child to remember
this phone number will require ongoing practice. Like with learning all things,
your child is going to need to practice the phone number again and again in
order to have it ingrained into his or her memory. Because the phone number
is such a short and simple activity though, you can practice learning it all
throughout the day, no matter where you are with your kids. Once you have taught
your child the basics of learning his or her phone number, you can ask periodically
throughout the day what the number is in order to get in this practice.

While it’s important
to teach your child your home phone number, it’s also important to remember
that a safety lesson needs to go along with learning it. You don’t want
your child to be giving your home phone number out to everyone he or she meets,
so you want to make sure to instill that this is a special number that you use
just with people you know. After your child knows the phone number, you can
explain that if your child ever gets lost from you and needs to find you, it’s
okay to give this number to an adult to help find you. Take each step in turn:
learn the phone number, practice the phone number, cover the safety reasons
and purpose of knowing the phone number.

Technorati Tags:child, kids, parenting, safety, phone number