How to Improve Memorization for Kids
For some children, memorization comes naturally. For others, it is a long and arduous process to memorize anything. Memorization is a skill that can be learned like any other. Here are some tips and tricks for helping students memorize information, ultimately giving them strategies that will improve their memorization skills for the future.
Instructions
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Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition is the mother of learning. If you really want a child to memorize something specific, have them practice, practice, practice. Repetition is what ultimately makes us commit things to memory. The average adult needs to hear something three times to remember it effectively, and the average kid needs to hear it much more often than that. Therefore, it is important to incorporate daily drills on key information from your curriculum, so that students hear it over and over again.
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Teach to different learning styles. Every child has a way of learning that works best for him. Find out what your student's primary learning style is. Visual learners may do better at memorizing things when they have a picture with which they associate the information. Some students may learn more effectively through verbal-auditory methods, such as singing, reciting or hearing information repeatedly. Other students will learn through writing the information down. For many students, physical movements trigger memories. I successfully taught short and long vowel sounds to elementary students by creating motions to go along with those sounds and practicing the sounds with the motions. Many young students, like mine, are kinesthetic learners, which means they learn through the use of their bodies. The most effective way to improve memorization for any child will be to use a combination of these strategies.
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Use mnemonic devices. Many adults remember using an acronym to name the planets, such as My Very Earnest Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto). Another type of mnemonic device is a short poem or line such as the rhyme "Thirty Days Hath September." These aids do help kids memorize information, and they are a practical tool that kids can use themselves to memorize other things.
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Use music. I mentioned singing as a useful memorization tool for auditory learners, but it works well for many students. Songs have helped my students learn to subtract double digits with borrowing and to name all of the types of geographical landforms. Pairing words with music makes it easier for people to commit information to memory and retrieve it quickly. I even had a linguistics professor who made up songs to help us memorize the key vocabulary---and it worked!
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Teach memorization explicitly as a skill. If you really want to improve kids' memorization for the long term, don't just use these tools in your lessons. Tell kids which tools they are going to use to memorize things and why. When they successfully memorize information, compliment them on their use of tools to help them remember. If your students are older, it may be useful to do a memorization project in which kids choose some information they would like to memorize and plan the tools they will use to help them, then go on to successfully commit that information to memory. This can be empowering for students, and it will teach them to use those skills later on in life when they need to memorize information for anatomy classes or biology exams.
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