On the Tip of Your Tongue: Memory Aids for Young Learners

Teachers are always looking for ways to make learning fun and easy. As a parent, you can do this also. Teachers attempt to do this in many ways and we love to share the ideas that work with parents and fellow teachers. Every little bit of help you, as a parent, can give your child before they enter the classroom gives your child an edge to succeed in school. Often we try to make our classroom bright and cheery by using colorful motivational and instructional posters. You can print motivational sayings from you computer and brighten up a young learner’s room with points to ponder. One poster many teachers use is the basic tenet of teaching. The poster says, “Tell Me, I Forget; Show Me, I Remember; Involve Me, I Understand”.

Memory tricks abound for students and teachers; I am sure you can remember some memory tricks or mnemonic devices from your school days. Where ever there is something to remember, there is a memory aid that can be put to use. You will find applicable memory aids for every discipline from music, medicine, biology, electronics, spelling, physics, geography, and remembering telephone numbers and grocery lists! Mnemonics works best when it links new information to prior knowledge through the use of visual and/or acoustic cues that are familiar to the learner.

If your child has trouble memorizing things, then he or she will probably struggle in the classroom setting. There is a great deal of information the classroom teacher has to offer and only a finite amount of time to work in. Add in behavior and remedial distractions and your child can find themselves waiting and waiting for help. I am adamant that the primary way for you to help your child survive and thrive in school is to take an active role in the beginning, and throughout the course, of your child’s education. As a parent, you have two choices, which boil down to allowing your child to rely solely on the teaching methods that have seemingly failed until now; or, introduce your child to strategies that make learning fun and easy. Any one of these mnemonic techniques will work depending on the material. It all comes down to finding the best learning aid for your son or daughter.

I’ve already shown you one that will help your child remember the seven colors of the rainbow: Roy G. Biv. Remembering a person’s name can help your child remember Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. There are many, many more memory/learning tricks just waiting to be dusted off to make learning easier for your child. Let us go over a few classic examples that I’m sure you have heard before.

The United States’ Great Lakes: HOME
Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, and Lake Erie.

For fire safety, we learned:
Stop! Drop! Roll!

For the months of the calendar year:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one
Excepting February alone:
Which hath only twenty-eight,
Until leap year gives it twenty-nine.

For weather predictions:
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

For summer safety in the yard:
Leaves of three, let it be.

And, for certain (king and coral) snakes:
Red on Yellow will kill a fellow, Red on Black is a friend of Jack

For scientific inventions:
LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation

SCUBA: Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

For beginning music lessons :
To learn notes on the treble clef scale going from the bottom to top
EGBDF: Every Good Boy Does Fine
For the notes represented by the spaces going from the bottom to top:
FACE: Fine Artists Command Envy

For our bi-annual clock readjustment for Standard and Daylight Savings Time:
Spring Forward, Fall Back

For Math:
My Dear Aunt Sally: Multiply and Divide before Adding or Subtracting

For Roman Numerals:
I Vant X-Rays and Lucy Can’t Drink Milk
I, V, X (1, 5, 10) & L, C, D, M (50, 100, 500, and 1000)

For Multiplication:
Minus times minus is plus, The reason for this we need not discuss.

For Biology:
King Phillip Came Over for the Genes Special: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, and Species.

Memory aids are also learning aids and should be used whenever helpful. The younger you start having a child become familiar with such memory and learning aid techniques the more natural their use becomes, and, often a student will adapt these techniques to maximize their value in a personal way. Mnemonic techniques are varied and can be applied to all areas of study. You will need to experiment to discover the technique best suited for your child.

Acronyms are formed by using each first letter from a group of words to form a new word to represent an idea. TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More is one example. This technique can be very useful when you need to remember words in a particular order. This technique is great for rote memorization but does not aid in comprehension.

Acrostics/sentences are similar to acronyms but instead of making an easy to remember word, you make a sentence using the first letters of what you need to remember. We can use the planets of our home solar system for an example here. Our planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto can be made into the acrostic: My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas. What kid doesn’t like a good pizza! And, of course, our little blue orb of a planet is always “the third rock from the sun”.

This acrostic memory aid is good for remembering a list of items in a specific order. Your memory aid sentence doesn’t have to make sense, in fact some off the wall sentences make it easier to remember difficult or lengthy lists. Children can make an acrostic using names of family members, friends, or pets so the list is easier to remember.

Rhymes are a great way for younger children to remember new information. Rhymes can be made into music using familiar or favorite melodies, or recited like a poem. The Alphabet Song is a common example of a singsong rhyme used to teach the very basic function of letter identification and sequence.

There are other mnemonic aids but these three are the most common and suitable for young learners. Be silly if the situation calls for it; the point is to have the young learner recall the information, not how it sounds or looks recalling the information. These aids can help your child thrive in the classroom by giving him or her an edge that has been honed since the early days of the Alphabet Song being sung at bedtime.