Letter mnemonic memory technique
Letter strategies, which involve using letter prompts to remember lists of things, are
the most familiar to children. Most former children remember using the acronym HOMES to
remember the names of the Great Lakes and FACE to remember the notes represented in the
spaces of the treble clef, from bottom to top. However, most acronyms assume that a name
of something will be remembered when the first letter is retrieved. However, this may not
always be true. For example, if a kid is unfamiliar with Lake Ontario, remembering
simply that the first letter is O is insufficient to prompt recall. The names of the
individual lakes must be practiced until they have become familiar.
Appropriate words cannot be easily constructed from the first letters of the words to
be remembered. For example, if you wished to remember the names of the planets in their
order from the sun, the letters would be M-V-E-M-J-S-U-N-P, from which a word cannot be
made. In these cases, an acrostic can be created, in which the first letters are
reconstructed to represent the words in a sentence. In this case, the sentence could be
"My very educated mother just sent us nine pizzas". Again, the names of the
planets must be sufficiently familiar so that man can retrieve a planet name, given
only the first letter. Also, it should be sufficiently familiar with the solar
system to know that the first M stands for Mercury, and not Mars.
For another example, to remember the classification taxonomy of living things, remember
the sentence, "King Philip's class ordered a family of gentle spaniels." This
sentence helps prompt kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, in order.
Exercise for mnemonic memory
Articles about mnemonic memory
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