Suggestions for helping students memorize important facts.
Subjects:
Memorizing Important Facts
Memorizing facts such as names, dates, vocabulary words or lists can be difficult. Here are several suggestions that can make memorizing a bit easier.- To remember a list of facts, try turning them into an acronym or mnemonic.
- An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters or groups of letters of words in a set phrase or series of words. For instance: WAC stands for Women's Army Corps, OPEC for Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or LORAN for long-range navigation.
- A mnemonic is something intended to assist the memory, like a verse or formula. For instance, in order to remember the planets(in order) one mnemonic is the sentence: Mark's Very Extravagant Mother Just Sent Us Ninety Parakeets. The first letter in each word stands for a planet: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
- An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters or groups of letters of words in a set phrase or series of words. For instance: WAC stands for Women's Army Corps, OPEC for Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or LORAN for long-range navigation.
- Make flashcards to remember math facts, vocabulary words and their definitions, or events and historical dates.
- Create a rhyming poem to help remember names and dates.
- An old favorite is: In fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
- Draw a dramatic or silly picture of the fact to make it particularly memorable.
- In order to remember a larger number of facts, play the game of "Memory".
- To play, you need index cards, a pen or pencil, and 2 or more players.
- Make the first card by putting a question on one side of it such as "Who is the current President of the United States?"
- Make a second card with the answer to the question on it: "President William Jefferson Clinton".
- Make enough pairs of cards to keep the game interesting.
- Shuffle the cards and place them face down on a table or floor.
- In order to play, each contestant picks up a card and tries to match it with its correct counterpart. If successful, the contestant keeps the pair of cards and continues taking turnsuntil he/she can no longer make any matches.
- The player that has the most cards in his/her possession at the end of the game wins.
- This game works well with cards that match by event and date, facts from the periodic chart, or vocabulary words and definitions.
