The Mnemonic Rules For Learning At School
The mnemonic rules are an excellent resource for study at all levels. Children, youth and adults can use them to memorize knowledge and take academic tests or exams.
Even the youngest can benefit from them. For this, parents must be guides and encourage children to use these intellectual tools.
The complexity of these techniques can be difficult to understand. However, there are some practical exercises based on mnemonic rules that we can teach children.
What do mnemonic rules consist of?
Briefly, the goal is to use short sentences and pictures to memorize concepts. Mental association will be the intellectual resource to be exercised and used to achieve a simpler learning.
The result is to facilitate memorization and improve memory skills with techniques based on the way the human mind works. In the end, a play on words or a learning routine can make things easier and catch our children’s interest.
These rules are a more useful resource than memorizing in a cluttered and tedious way. Added to this, parents will be surprised to understand that they can make studying a lot of fun. Let’s look at some exercises that will be helpful in organizing our children’s study.
Create fun acrostics with hidden concepts
Acrostics are simple words created from the abbreviations or initials of other words. The idea here is that if our child needs to learn two or more concepts, put them in that keyword.
This can be useful, for example, when teaching the properties of sums. We know that two of them are the associative and the commutative; in this way, if we take the initial syllables, they would be “As” and “Co”.
If we want the child to learn them, we can make him remember them with the word “disgust”. In this way, the child, when saying it, will associate it with the two related concepts. It will also easily distinguish the meaning of each property in the sum.
Create a song with some theme
This is the technique most used in successful educational systems like those in Finland or Estonia. Teachers in these countries have been using this technique since the children are four years old. This is one of the most effective mnemonic rules out there.
The idea is to convey concepts, abstractions and any kind of learning through music. Instead of having to learn a boring meaning, the child learns music because he likes it and it is fun. With that, he ends up memorizing almost involuntarily.
We adults have also been taught in a similar way in the past; the most remembered example is alphabet music. Currently, this technique can be used for all types of content.
Linking the contents to an image
Just as computers store all information in digits, we learn faster with the help of images. There is no doubt that the senses and association play a fundamental role in the human brain; this can be useful for the younger ones.
In practice, there are contents that we learn through the use of images from an early age. Without going too far, this is what we necessarily do to learn the different colors. Children also use pictures to memorize animals.
This technique has some limitations; in general, they are useful tricks for learning simple concepts. However, making mind and concept maps has a lot to do with this feature. Images allow complex processes to be simplified.
Mnemonic rules: use technology to your advantage
Why repeat something over and over if a digital device can do it? In this way, repetition is external, while children just learn and associate. Recording is a great learning resource.
Young university students use it a lot for their studies. But parents of elementary and high school children are not used to using this technique.
If we have young children, we can prepare recordings to help them memorize concepts; it is possible to choose and plan a fun and educational content so that the child does not get bored.
There are many other useful, complex and fun techniques. Almost any kind of knowledge can be memorized and internalized by these rules. The trick: adapting our own brains and those of children.
