This book of photocopiable puzzles, that may be used in the classroom and at home, is the result of a request from the World Memory Sports Council (WMSC), the governing body for the World Memory Championships (WMC), to create an international memory competition for pre-schoolers. I decided from the outset that it needed to be fun, stress-free and independent of language: not only for the young pre-reading age children but also for the parent/teacher guiding them.

Visual memory training is nothing new. The Ancient Greeks valued it highly but until recently it seems to have been seen...