Challenging, fun and useful game!
Author: Corina de Boer-Vreeke
Supervisor of children and mother
The game memory.... 
....who doesn't know it and who hasn't played it? I think there are only a few. I've played it very often with our children. In many different forms. With pictures of wild animals, Disney pictures, Winny the Pooh, the postcode lottery, made of wood, cardboard, self-made from magazine pictures... what nice memories. And what did we, both the children and I, unconsciously learn a lot!
Memory training (memory, concentration and patience)
If you have ever played memory with young children, you know that your chances of winning are very small. Memories is a real brain trainer for adults!
It uses your short-term memory. We adults are often easily distracted. For example, between two turns we think about what still needs to be done “when the game is over”. Young children are not yet occupied with that. They concentrate on the game and are often completely absorbed in it. Result? A large stack of cards for your child and you three sets. So now you know what to do if you also want to win from your child… be completely present during your activity 😊.
Tactile memory (sense of touch)
Tactile memory adds a fun and important dimension to the old familiar visual game. In addition to training memory, concentration and patience and learning to deal with (possibly) losing a game, the sense of touch is now also trained!
While playing the game I quickly discovered that the sense of touch, of both children and adults, could use some training. And touch memory is really very suitable for that!
Sensitivity
With feelmemo you use your fingertips to feel stones with different materials on them and find them together. There are no less than 16 pairs with different materials in the bag; leather, coarse and fine embroidery fabric, coarse and fine sandpaper, relief paper, carpeting, felt, mirror, silver paper, lacquered, fabric, coarse and fine nylon, plastic mat and cardboard.
With so much variety in materials you can also link a learning aspect to it if you want. Naming the structures, hard, smooth, rough, soft, ribbed, fluffy…. And with the different colours you can also get started, even in combination with the types of materials. Feeling, looking, naming…. Learning!
The difference in the structure of the materials is sometimes small and that requires great concentration and sensitivity. However, after about 4 times I noticed in both myself and the children that this sensitivity had already developed. My niece (5 years old) was allowed to start the 5th time and I could hardly get in between, she found so many identical pairs in a row!
Getting Started
You can use touch memory in various ways. Depending on age and development, you choose a variant.
Look and feel
This is the exploratory version of the game. Look at the different structures and colors of the stones together. Feel them well. This is how you start to connect your sense of touch to a feeling, a structure, a picture in your head.
Stones on the head
Place all the stones with the structure side down in a jumble. Now, just like with regular memory, you turn over two stones at a time. Do they have the same structure? Then you can keep them! Not the same? Turn them over and remember where they are. The turn goes on to the next person.
Stones in the bag
Put all the memory stones in the corresponding bag. Now take a stone out. Feel the structure of this stone very well. Then put your hand in the bag again and feel... can you find the stone with the same structure? Yes? Then you can try again! No? Put the first stone back in the bag and pass it on to the next.
Is it difficult to feel with one hand? Then put all the stones under a tea towel. That way you can feel with both hands at the same time. Do you have a blindfold at hand? Then you don't need the tea towel and the other children can watch and possibly give hints 😊.
All in all, feel memo is a fun and educational game with different game variations. You can do it with a group, in pairs and children can play alone. Plenty of possibilities. And do the dolls in your dollhouse have so many visitors that you run out of tables and chairs? Then a few touch memory stones are very suitable, I know from a reliable source 😉.
