The Home Education

Mneumonics are memory aids. They can be rhymes, acrostics, acronyms and other devices to help remember key facts. They are especially helpful to  auditory learners.

Remember the rhyme about Christopher Columbus we learned in school? In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I will always remember the year he discovered America thanks to this rhyme.

What if you needed to know the line up of planets from the Sun? Create a sentence using the first letter of each planet to start a word in the sentence. For example: My Very Excited Mom Just Started Using New Pillows. The first letter of each word in the sentence represents the planets and all the words in the sentence show us the order of the planets. This is a good technique to help remember the order of many different things.

Acronym is an abbreviation of several words in such a way that the abbreviation itself forms a pronounceable word. For example SCUBA stands for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. This is another way you can use to help remember important things – such as the Great Lakes – use the acronym HOMES to identify Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior.

Mneumonics are fun to use to show differences in similar words. Stalactites and Stalagmites are similar words, both representing formations of rock within a cave. StalaGmites has a G in it so it represents the one that grows from the Ground and StalacTites grow from the Top.

Encourage children to make up their own rhymes, acrostics, acronyms or other memory aids – they will remember them better that way.