Knowing how
your students’ memories work and the memory process can help a teacher plan her
lessons and teaching. She can understand why students may not understand or remember
something they learned. With the information
process model, a teacher can understand that students have multiple stimuli
going into their brain throughout the day and some of it may get weeded out. In
order remember it students must encode it or rehearse it. Teachers can help
give meaning to what students are learning, rather than just lecturing and
presenting information. If a student does an activity that relates to what they
are talking about, it will give the subject meaning.
Also, teachers
can help students remember certain things through repeating it, mnemonics,
organization, elaboration or through visual imagery. Students will learn different
and some strategies may work better for certain students than others. Anytime
you can create an analogy or help organize information, this could possibly
help students remember it. It is important to make sure to encourage kids to be
creative with their memory devices because it is whatever works for them…there
is not right or wrong answer.
This is a great
website called Let Kids Lead where students have shared their favorite
mnemonics devices. They are pretty clever!
I like the example on the website you gave about associating what you are trying to remember with something funny. If you are trying to remember shoe, tree, and hat, then imagine a tree wearing a shoe and a hat. I have never thought of this before and I like it because I am a visual learning. Jordan mentioned thinking of something crazy and that will stand out to you. These are all great ideas.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you when you said students need to be creative when it comes to their memory devices. Everybody works in different ways and not every mnemonic works for everybody. If students create one on their own, they will have a better chance of remembering.
I really liked your website because I think it will be a great resource to use in the future if you have a student who is really struggling to remember something like the order of the planets or how to work out a math problem. I also liked how you mentioned in your post that one strategy is not going to work for every child because I think some teachers forget that what works best for them may not work best for their students.
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