Increase Your Child's Memory of Information and Facts

As a teacher and parent, I am always looking for ways to help my children increase their retention of important facts and information. The use of mnemonics is an age old trick that is still used today in education and our everyday lives. You might be using some mnemonics and not be aware of it. I can hear everyone scratching their heads, trying to figure out what a mnemonic is. A mnemonic is simply a means of capturing important information. It often is in the form of a rhyme, a sentence or an acronym that is used to remember lists, rules or orders. A mnemonic can be used in almost any subject. Following are a list of the most common mnemonics devices.

1) "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally." Anyone who has struggled with the order of operations in math will be familiar with this mnemonic device. If you have ever wondered whether you square a number before subtracting, this will come in handy. This mnemonic stands for parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. As a student advances to more difficult math subjects, this mnemonic will come in handy.

2) "My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas." Have you or your child ever had a science teacher that wanted you to know the order of the planets? This mnemonic device comes in handy when trying to remember the order of the planets from the sun to the outer rim of our solar system. It stands for Mars, Venus, Earth, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Some will argue whether or not Pluto is a planet. But what would the mnemonic be without a pizza? It just wouldn't make sense anymore. Then again, according to scientists, there might be another planet, named planet X , located beyond Pluto. Maybe we could serve up nine x-rays?

3) "When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." This is a mnemonic rhyme that I often use with my learning disabled students to help them remember the pronunciation of words with two vowels. Also, many kindergartners and first graders use this rule to help them learn to read some of the most basic words in the English language.

4) Another use of a mnemonic device is in spelling. For difficult words, spelling acronyms can be used. A couple of these are, "A Rat in the House May Eat the Ice Cream" to remember arithmetic, or "Rhythm Helps Your Two Hips Move" for the spelling of rhythm.

5) Students of music are familiar with several mnemonics. "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge." This is used to remember the notes on a treble or upper musical lines or the notes of e, g, b "Face" for the corresponding notes of f, a, c, and e.

6) "HOMES." This is the great lakes or Huron, Ontario, Michigan Erie, and Superior. Every geography teacher loves this mnemonic device.

7) "King Phillip Came Over for Great Spaghetti." This stands for the taxonomy order in biology. Anyone who has ever taken biology can remember having to get straight whether kingdom or genus was first. By using this mnemonic, a student can remember the taxonomy order as Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.

8) "Roy G. Biv" or "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain." This stands for the colors in the rainbow or red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Roy G. Biv is often the easier to remember as it is shorter.

9) Almost everyone uses this common mnemonic rhyme. "30 days has September, April, June, and November. All the rest have 31, except February which has 28 and 29 in leap year." I dare say there isn't a child or adult who uses this often to figure out how many days are in a given month.

10) A math teacher taught me this mnemonic one year when I was inclusion teaching in her classroom. Students often are confused about multiplying negative and positive numbers. Her statement that proved foolproof is this: "2 ugly parents always have a pretty baby. 2 pretty parents always have a pretty baby. An ugly parent and a pretty parent always have an ugly baby." Seems negative times negative would suffice, but the students always get confused. However after hearing this sentence, they always got it right. Of course an ugly parent stands for a negative number and a pretty parent stands for a positive number.

There are countless other mnemonic devices that can aid memory for both your child and yourself. Many parents often come up with their own mnemonic devices to help their child remember information. By using a mnemonic device, learning facts, orders, and list, can be made much easier for our children.