Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Works for Me - Memorizing Box


Memorizing is a wonderful skill that we should all work on. It is good for children as well as adults. I believe that while memorizing is difficult for adults, it is the best thing we can do to help our brains stay active and young. My 92 year old father-in-law is a perfect example. He can quote poetry and scripture beautifully. He also does the daily crossword puzzle.
In our family scripture memorization is our main task, but we do throw in poetry, hymns, songs and other items. I found a great tool at Simply Charlotte Mason to enhance memorizing. It is a system utilizing a 3x5 file box, dividers and your things to memorize. You will need dividers marked the following way:
*daily
*one each for the days of the week
*31 dividers numbered 1-31
*2 dividers one labeled odd, the other one labeled even
You begin with things you already have memorized, write them on 3x5 cards and disperse them through the dividers. These will be your review items. New things you wish to learn put in front of the daily divider. Pick one that you will begin working on, this one goes behind your daily card. Each day you review your daily card and the other cards that correspond to that date. For example, today is Wednesday - January 10th, you would work on your daily card and review the items behind the Wednesday, #10 and even cards. Tomorrow, you would work on daily, Thursday, #11 and odd. In this manner, each day of the month you will be reviewing items already learned to keep them cemented in your little "ole" brain. As you learn your "daily" item, move it behind the odd or even card and pick a new "daily". The learned item will then progress to a "day of the week" divider and finally to a numbered divider.
This system has worked in our family, the boys enjoy it and it is finally working with my brain. One of my goals this year was to work on more scripture memory, this system Works for Me!

3 comments:

Beth said...

Glad to hear you frogged your sock - you know you'd have never been happy with it. Life is too short to knit yucky things. I frogged my sock last night and got the hank rewound and ready to go for my second Fancy Silk Sock.

Project Spectrum is best explained here http://lollygirl.com/blog/?p=585 It's a great way of thinking about and being creative with color. I'm participating personally but I also plan to get my boys involved. We'll be doing some origami, painting, collage work. baking and a few other surprise projects. I may even pull out the Harrisville Peg Loom that has been sitting in the closet for years. My older son will be doing some photography also.

Take a look. You might be interested. I know that Sarah from Poppins Classical Academy is participating with her kids too.

Anonymous said...

I love that idea. Thanks for sharing!

Anonymous said...

I have been wanting to get more organized with our memory work. I love how the reviewing is such an organized part of this. Thanks!