Mnemonics are most intensively used for teaching preschoolers in kindergarten, but experts in this science assure that in a slightly modified form it can be applied to any other age, including schoolchildren of elementary and even middle grades. Of course, here the methods and techniques of teaching are somewhat more complicated, so it is worth considering them in more detail.
Age features
The first basics of mnemonics are given in kindergarten - it is there that this technology is used most often. But the school does not always pay enough attention to this. The principles of presenting information regarding visibility, ties on associative thinking and the ability to interest the addressee remain relevant, but in general, mnemonics for school-age children use a slightly different toolkit than that used in kindergarten.
So, with age, the child gradually begins to understand the importance and necessity of learning, even if the material presented is not very interesting to him. This allows the methodology to be used to convey absolutely any useful information from the school curriculum, even if the form of its presentation does not arouse interest in an uninterested person.
In addition, a grown-up child is no longer so attached to bright colors, and therefore information can be submitted without any pictures at all. At the same time, the volume of his memory increases significantly, due to which, for example, poetry is actively used for memorization. Of course, not all lessons can be put into poetic form, but for the same memorization of foreign vocabulary, this is a very practical solution.
Images can still be used, but it is not bright colors that are important here, but the ability to expand understanding or add associations. When studying biology, even a black and white photograph of an animal is much more useful than the brightest drawing, and in teaching physics, a visual diagram of the action of forces or the work of mechanisms. In both cases, it is better to supplement the illustrations with text that allows you to draw the correct conclusions from what you saw, while the verbal description itself without a picture could give a wrong idea of the topic being studied. Respectively, the drawing should always be unambiguous and avoid ambiguous interpretations.
Junior School
Exercises in mnemonics for primary school age are in many ways similar to kindergarten exercises, but they also have their own specifics. Here, special attention is paid to poetry, since many of the studied concepts cannot be conveyed by an image, and poetry at the same time helps to improve the memory of children. For grades 1-4, a huge number of children's poems have been written, where the basic rules of the same mathematics are briefly revealed.
Some of the rules are not written in poetry, but simply in easy-to-remember formulations like "I'm already unbearable to get married" - the last example lists words ending in "w", at the end of which the soft sign is not written. Thanks to this, even boring information makes the child smile, helping to maintain his interest.
For children under 10 years old, there is still a sense of putting learning into a game, since they are not always ready to learn difficult material simply because it is necessary. If possible, some activities should be less formal - a child who feels free and confident often performs better. So, a popular method of learning foreign languages is informal gatherings with tea in the classroom - for a while, those present are prohibited from speaking their native language. At the same time, no one will ask the kid difficult questions, and it’s absolutely impossible to get a grade here, and in fact you don’t need to learn anything - getting into the language environment, the child will certainly remember something new.
Old school
Closer to adolescence, a child is already able to force himself to remember information, even if he is not interested, but this does not mean that the process cannot be simplified.
At this point, a curious student may be interested in statistics about what he is studying. Arguing about the same physics, a student may not be interested in a detailed presentation of the device in the form of a whole paragraph, but he may be interested in the image in the book and a brief table of the main parameters next to it. This is a squeeze of the necessary information, calculated on the fact that a person with well-developed logic and minimal knowledge of the topic will substitute everything else himself. Although such a presentation requires minimal preliminary preparation, the block of information itself looks smaller and therefore not so discouraging. If you also accompany the submitted numbers with interesting facts and comparisons, it will become much easier to remember them.
Another vivid example of mnemonics is writing essays on a specific topic. Much more information is stored in our memory than we can imagine, but it must be periodically stirred up and systematized so that it is not forgotten - then the amount of memory will grow. By inviting the child to speak on a certain topic, which he himself might not have thought of, the teachers make him extract from memory everything known about the subject, strain his logic, and sometimes ask himself unexpected questions and independently seek answers to them. If the task also consists not in writing an essay, but in formulating a detailed answer from the head, and providing it the next day, then such a formulation of the question will also train the amount of memory.
For more information on using mnemonic techniques for teaching children, see the next video.
