National Memory Master Competition

Confidence – Doing NMM taught Ivy that she CAN learn/ memorize a large amount of material just by working hard and not giving up. This was HUGE! She is not afraid to tackle any lesson…every lesson seems small compared to learning an entire CC Cycle.

Mastering the Memory Work- Knowing the memory work very firmly- especially the Latin declensions and conjugations, helped prepare me for Challenge A. The cartography for the world map drawing taught me the basic shapes of many of the countries. It also taught me how to memorize drawing the countries on a grid because I did it over and over again in preparation for the competition.

Family Bonding- I committed to memorizing the timeline backward WITH my son. This helped him emotionally and strategically, as we had to problem-solve together HOW it could be done. Since I have five children (including an extremely active one year old as we prepared), these sessions often occurred in odd segments of time including very late at night, but the bonding of those hours will stay with me a long time.

Time management – THIS, in my opinion, is the MOST important skill we gained from National Memory Master. My son, Ethan, and I would sit down and make a plan for what he needed to work on each day, which included his own school work, Essentials, and also National Memory Master work-like the timeline backwards, and he would prioritize his day and work. We would take breaks and I would go over stuff with him during the day, BUT this was his responsibility and he took ownership of this. IT is a huge leap from Foundations/ Essentials to Challenge A and this prepared us for the transition. This experience taught him to work HARD and to tackle HARD things, which is all a part of challenge work.