One of the best benefits of a CC community day for homeschool parents is the on-site training they receive for classical teaching instruction. One of the core habits of grammar is memorization, and our Foundations tutors do a fantastic job of modeling memory work techniques and review activities that can easily be duplicated at home.
However, we can sometimes neglect to incorporate these ideas into our daily memory work review routines. Daily review can become tiresome and tedious for us and our children if we always use the same methods, especially towards the end of the year when so much material needs to be covered. I know even I am tempted to skip review when it feels stale or perfunctory!
Practicing the skill of retaining memory work through repetition is necessary if we want our children to own it for a lifetime and not merely recall it for a few days or weeks. With that in mind, here is a compiled list of some favorite at-home review ideas. I hope you are able to find a few new ideas to try out this week!
Listen to learn more Memorizing Tips and Tricks for Families with the Everyday Educator podcast.
Memory Work Techniques for Any Subject
- Invite your students to recite memory work while being active—jumping up and down, performing toe touches, spinning in a circle, doing a bridge, balancing on one foot, etc.
- Have students recite memory work using funny voices or while making faces.
- Allow students to “win” memory work cards from you by correctly reciting the information on each card. Offer a simple prize if they win a certain number of cards—a story of their choice snuggled up with mom or dad, a cookie after lunch, or an extra five minutes of tickling at bedtime.
- Let students write the memory work on windows and doors with window markers or crayons. On warmer days, they can pull out the sidewalk chalk.
- Change it up! If you usually review the questions for a particular subject in order by week, shuffle the deck and ask them in a random order.
- Let students test Mom or Dad on the memory work. It’s amazing how attentive to detail they can be when they are watching for errors from Mom and Dad! Asking them to coach you on how to remember pieces of the memory work also helps them retain the memory work and review effective memory techniques.
- Play tic tac toe as you ask questions. If students can state the complete fact, they can draw an “X” or “O.”
- Play Hide the Thimble and have students recite a piece of memory work in order to get clues about whether they are getting hotter or colder.
- Host a review party for your child’s Foundations class and invite your children to create their own review games and activities.
These general suggestions work well with almost every subject, but a few ideas are subject-specific.
Subject-Specific Ideas for Memory Work Fun
Geography
- Use mini chocolate chips to mark geography locations. This technique never fails to please in our household!
- Pull out a map and invite students to “Tell me everything you know.” This can speed up geography review because it removes the need to ask questions. Students can just quickly identify all locations that they know and often find it satisfying to realize how much they know.
- Play hangman with geography memory work.
History
- If you usually sing the history songs, try saying them in a monotone without the rhythm (it won’t work, but it’s likely to lead to giggles).
- Call out a key word from the history sentence and see if your student can identify the corresponding question “Tell me about…” and sentence.
- Play Mad-Libs with the History sentences. Write out the sentence, leaving blanks for the nouns, verbs, or adjectives. Create a silly sentence, then let your children tell you the correct words for the sentence.
Math
- Kick or toss a ball back and forth while chanting math facts.
- Select a number 1-15 and then roll two dice. Students must add the numbers on the dice and then multiply the sum by the selected number. We usually roll the dice five to ten times before selecting a new number.
Timeline
- Remove one timeline card from a series of cards and ask students to name the missing card and show where it belongs in the timeline.
- Mix the timeline cards up and have students put them back in order. Warning! It can be overwhelming to do this with the whole timeline at once! I’d recommend doing one or two weeks’ worth at a time to begin with.
- Grab a partner and alternate listing the timeline events. Person #1 says, “Age of Ancient Empires,” and Person #2 says, “Creation and the Fall,” and so on as far as you can go. Repeat in the opposite order.
- Choose an event from the timeline at random and ask the other person to list the events immediately preceding and following it.
Latin
- Use puppets to draw children in and engage them with Latin. We had two puppets. Leo, the Latin Leopard, could only speak Latin, so our other puppet translated what Leo wanted to say into English. But Leo always loved to sing our Latin song from Cycle 3 in his best opera voice.
- Go outside and make a hopscotch board on the sidewalk. Fill in the spaces with Latin noun declension endings or verb conjugation endings, and let your child get hopping.
Science
- See how many times your child can say the memory work while a top or a fidget spinner is spinning. What are the phases of the moon? The phases of the moon are (SPIN!) new, crescent, quarter, gibbous, full…new, crescent, quarter, gibbous, full…
- Let your children have a full-body experience with science. Have them act out the types of volcanoes or the states of matter.
English
- Make fun hand motions to accompany the Prepositions song in Cycle 1, or students can act out the prepositions in relation to a table, ball, or even their pet!
- Pull out your child’s favorite stuffies and use them as you chant the possessive pronouns and possessive pronoun adjectives in Cycle 2.
- Play ‘hot potato’ or just pass a ball when learning the irregular verbs from Cycle 3.
Make Memory Work a Memory-Making Experience
Keeping memory work fresh at home is key to helping your children truly own what they’ve learned—but it doesn’t have to feel like a chore! Play is a powerful tool, and when you weave it into your review time, memory work becomes more than just repetition; it turns into a fun, memory-making experience.
So go ahead—toss the ball, sing the songs, act it out, and laugh along the way. These moments of learning together will not only help the facts stick but will also become some of your family’s sweetest homeschooling memories!
