Memorization Tips, Tricks & Games

[songsparrow]

I am preparing to teach Michael Clay Thompson's Grammar Town level to my 5th grade daughter this fall. I see that pretty quickly he has things that he suggests the student memorize - a list of Latin word pieces, the subject pronouns and object pronouns.

 

I dread making my daughter memorize things. I just remember it as such drudgery from my school days; I memorized things for a test, and then promptly forgot them. Maybe she'll memorize them quickly, and it's not as big of a deal as I'm making it out to be, but I'm looking for a little inspiration. So . . .

 

How do you work with your kids to memorize these types of lists? Any tips, tricks or games?

 

The only ideas I've come up with so far are (not the most creative, I know):

 

• Post posters with the words, and whenever we come across an item from one of the lists, point it out and discuss it briefly.
  
• Each day at the start of our Language Arts time, have a little quiz and see how many she can remember. Continue until she consistently remembers all of them.
  
• Make up a little song (I don't know if I'm creative enough to do this effectively - maybe I should have my daughter make up the song, she likes to do that.)
  

 

Edited August 30, 2011 by songsparrow

[hsmom27]

We do quite a bit of memorization. I put all their memory work on index cards. The best trick I've found is to work for a very short period of time, but work multiple times a day. So the ones that can read, read through their cards at breakfast, lunch and after dinner and somehow it all just sort of seeps into their little brains.

[zoo_keeper]

For the subject pronouns, I just stumbled across this poem:

 

Who are you?

How do you do?

It is I who says "Hi!"

He and she say "Goodbye."

They say "Boo hoo!",

And we do, too.

[baybedaul]

We started following the Simply Charlotte Mason way of organizing our memory work after seeing it mentioned a few times on this forum. Just takes a few minutes each day and so far it seems to be really effective! Maybe not terribly exciting, but my kids are young and they enjoy just figuring out which tabs we're on for the day.

 

http://simplycharlottemason.com/timesavers/memorysys/

 

Our first two memory pieces were The Lord's Prayer and The Pledge of Allegiance. It wouldn't work with all memory pieces, but for those we were able to find topical children's books at the library so that their memory work had a little more context.

[Tracy]

Here are some games that I have used with my dd6, particularly when we tackle larger works.

 

1. Write it on the chalkboard. Roll a die. Erase that many words. Try to read it without the erased words. It is especially fun when you have the whole family doing it together. If we want it to go faster we use a die with more sides (usually 10 sides).

 

2. Write only the first letter of each word and see if you can say it with only those clues.

 

3. Print out the words, cut them out, and mix them up. See if the dc can put it back together. With younger children, you can leave some of the words stuck together to make a little less challenging.