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Even if you haven’t heard of the word mnemonics (pronounced ni-mä-nik),you have probably used this sometime in your school career. Mnemonic devices can help us remember quantities of information or just a bit of information that is not familiar and may be difficult to remember. Anytime you use one thing to help you remember something else, you are using mnemonics.

Did you learn the “order of operations” for math? Instead of trying to memorize “Parentheses, exponent, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction,” many of us (or our children) have used the mnemonic phrase “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally.” This sentence makes sense to most people, and is relatively easy to remember. Once learned, your children can remember the order of operations by simply saying the phrase they learned to remind them of the correct order.

In art class, the phrase “Roy G. Biv”, is used to remind students of the colors in the spectrum – Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

Mnemonic devices are used in music. The names for the notes on the lines of the treble clef can be learned by using the phrase, “Every good boy deserves fudge,” or “Every good bird does fly”. Maybe you learned the names of the spaces by spelling out “F A C E” or you learned “All cows eat grass” or “All cars eat gas” for the notes in the bass clef.

How about classification in biology? One mnemonic sentence for classification could be “King Phillip came over for great spaghetti” which would help the student to remember the classification of “Kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species.” Your student can name the planets in order by creating a sentence such as “My very educated mother just served us nachos” which is Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

During the study of maps, if you want your student to learn some of the countries on a continent, creating a nonsensical word with some of the first letters of the countries can help your student to remember these in order. If you look across the top of Europe and down the right side near Russia, you can see “INSFELLBURB” which stands for “Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria.” Right in the middle of Europe, is the Czech Republic and below it is Austria. The first letters spell CRA. Right beside Czech Republic is Slovakia, and below Slovakia is Hungary. (SH) If you put the letters together you get the word CRASH – a mnemonic device to remember those four countries.

Your student can have fun creating a sentence, word or nonsensical word to help with memorizing facts that will help him or her to remember something in order. And the more they practice creating mnemonics, the better they will get, and the more they will be able to remember.

Don’t let your student get discouraged over memorizing information. Mnemonic devices can help both young students and older students when coming up against facts that must be memorized.

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Learn the Presidents in Order ebook uses this same idea to help your student create four different sentences for learning the presidents in order. You can read about it at ToytownTreasures — and it is available at Currclick.