Music mnemonic: Music has long been a useful mnemonic device; many students learn the alphabet or the quadratic equation using a melody. Advertisers also frequently take advantage of this mnemonic by setting their slogans to catchy melodies. For best use of this strategy, set a list of steps or facts to a song or melody that most students will be familiar with. Students can create their own music mnemonics by using the melody of a nursery rhyme, pop song, or common folk song to help them remember facts, dates, processes, and other lists of information. Extend this activity by having students create a short music video to accompany their music mnemonic.
• Image mnemonic: Unlike pictorial notes, an image mnemonic may not represent a fact or concept directly but may instead capitalize on the sound or other qualities of the concept to create a memorable, often silly, image. Students draw an image to help them remember content. For example, in order to remember that pi is the ratio of the circle’s circumference to its diameter, a student might draw a whole pie balancing on top of half a pie. In this kind of mnemonic, while it is important to create a memorable image, it is equally important that the student is able to link the image to the fact or concept to remember, so it is essential that the connection between the image and content is not too tenuous.
• Spelling mnemonic: Students can create their own spelling mnemonics to help them remember the spelling of words that they often forget. This activity works well for distinguishing between two words that are very similar in spelling or sound. Teachers and students can use images, pithy phrases, or other devices to design a spelling mnemonic. One example of a spelling mnemonic, “you always want two desserts, but you only want one desert,” helps students remember that dessert has two of the letter s and desert only has one.
Rhyming Pegwords
Students use this strategy to remember a list of facts or information. The method uses a set of concrete images that rhyme with the numbers one through ten, such as the following.
One is a bun.
Two is a shoe.
Three is a tree.
Four is a door.
Five is a hive.
Six is a stack of sticks.
Seven is heaven.
Eight is a gate.
Nine is a line.
Ten is a hen.
To remember a fact or piece of information, a student associates it with one of the concrete images. For example, a student might want to remember the following list of information about ancient Egyptian civilization.
1. Egyptian civilization developed along the Nile River in Africa.
2. The Egyptians used a system of writing called hieroglyphics.
3. The Egyptians built the pyramids as burial places for their pharaohs.
To remember these facts, the student might connect the first item to the image for the number one, a bun. He or she might picture a hot dog bun with the Nile River flowing through the center of it. The second item would be connected to the image for the number two, a shoe—perhaps a shoe with hieroglyphs written on the side of it. The third item in the list would be connected to the image of a tree, for the number three. The student might imagine a tree whose leaves and branches had been trimmed to create a pyramid shape. These images help the student ensure that he or she has remembered all the items in the list. This strategy is especially helpful with long lists of facts or lists that must be recalled in a certain order.
Link Strategies
Students use this strategy to remember facts or information by first creating symbols or substitutes for important ideas and then linking those symbols or substitutes together in a narrative. A symbol is an image that reminds one of important information, like a rainbow to represent the concept of an arc. A substitute is a word that is easy to picture and sounds like the information one is trying to remember, like the word ark to remember the concept of the arc of a circle.
For example, consider the scientific process. There are generally six steps in the process: (1) ask a question, (2) do background research, (3) construct a hypothesis, (4) test the hypothesis by doing an experiment, (5) analyze the data and draw a conclusion, and (6) report the results. The link strategy might produce the following narrative and symbols.
Prince Science went on a quest with his handy magnifying glass to look for the magic hippo. He went through many perils but trusted his horse, Dart, to draw him to the hippo’s conclave. Afterward, the hippo and the prince developed quite the rapport.
• Quest: Quest sounds like question and stands in for the first step of the scientific process.
• Magnifying glass: Magnifying glass stands in as a symbol for research.
• Hippo: Hippo is a substitute for the word hypothesis.
• Perils: Perils is a substitute for the word experiment, because it sounds similar.
• Dart and the hippo’s conclave: The phrasing of this sentence is meant to sound like and be a substitution for data and draw a conclusion.
• Rapport: Rapport is a substitute for report.
Monitoring Element 8
Specific student responses and behaviors allow the teacher to determine whether this element is being implemented effectively and producing the desired effects.
• Students produce summaries that include critical information.
• Students produce nonlinguistic representations that include critical information.
• Students can explain their linguistic and nonlinguistic representations.
• Students remember the critical content from previous lessons.
Use this list to monitor student responses to element 8.
To monitor your own use of this element, use the scale in figure 3.19 in combination with the reproducible “Tracking Teacher Actions: Recording and Representing Content” (page 64). As with other proficiency scales, level 3 or higher is the goal.
Figure 3.19: Self-rating scale for element 8—Recording and representing content.
The following examples describe what each level of the scale might look like in the classroom.
• Not Using (0): A teacher expects that her students will take notes if they need to, but she does not provide them with any kind of strategies to do so.
• Beginning (1): A teacher asks his students to use combination notes to record critical information from a lesson. However, students are unfamiliar with the summarizing part of the organizer, and because the teacher
