Memory Tricks

Debbie Willingham
Apr 20, 2009

Sometimes the content our students need to know just has to be memorized. When that is the case, there are many "memory tricks" you can use with your students to help them remember important information. Mnemonics can be used and new ones created (either by you or your students) to help them learn. Here are some possible ways to connect new learning so that it can be remembered:

  • Take-a-trip - Visualize familiar objects around a room and attach some information to each object.  

                              Mentally walk around the room and recall the information attached to each object.

 

  • Acrostics - Make up a sentence using the first letter of each word (Every Good Boy Does Fine - lines of the treble clef - E, G, B, D, F).

 

  • Acronyms - Use the letters of a word to remind you of the words in a list or sequence (HOMES for the Great Lakes).

 

  • Poems, Rhymes, and Lyrics - Use a familiar tune, and substitute information to be learned, or create a rhyme with the information (In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue).

 

  • Mind/Mental Maps - Organize mental maps with important information, or mentally learn how and where information is arranged on a graphic organizer.

 

  • Mental pictures - Close your eyes and visualize what the total picture looks like (bones of the body on a skeleton, a geographic map).

 

  • Write it - Write it repeatedly, saying it aloud as you write; write and say it to yourself just before you go to sleep.


When students have something fairly sophisticated they need to memorize, take a little class time to talk about how they think they may be able to learn it. You may even let them work together to come up with their own "memory tricks" to learn specific information.

See Connecting Exemplary Practices in Acquisition Lessons for mnemonic strategies and more.