Mnemonics

[Pam Koleszar]

I use a lot of silly songs and rhythms, acronyms and puns in my classroom, and I was wondering what everyone else uses. For example, yesterday I taught possum and I gave the students some rules to remember. 1. POT = ABLE (If you put the prefix POT in front of a form of sum, you must put ABLE after its meaning.) and 2. POT + U = PERFECT (If the verb starts with POTU, it's one of the perfect tenses. This helps distinguish the imperfect from the pluperfect.)

These always get a lot of laughs in my classes, but the students never forget them. What are your memorable tricks?

[Laura Gibbs]

I was always a fan of

After si and nisi, num and ne, all the ali-s drop away

[April]

That is one of my favorites as well, and what I always think of whenever I see a Si quis, or some such...:)

[Mark A. Keith]

How about...

Dic, duc, fac, and fer
Should have an "e" but it isn't there!

[Laura Gibbs]

Mark, not relevant to the mnemonic discussion, but your avatar is fabulous! :-)

[Pam Koleszar]

My students developed more today: Bo Beats Bill 3x Bunting - to help them remember the future passive indicator letters for first and second conjugation (bo, be, bi, bi, bi, bu). Another favorite was for the passive endings: Study OR RISk your fuTURe. MURder puts MINI adveNTURes in life. They justified the MINI (vs. many) by saying you would have multiple small adventures running from the cops.

They will never cease to amaze me. Whatever works!

[Kokkie van Oeveren]

I am a teacher from the Netherlands and I am always looking for new ideas to use in class. I use songs a lot. For example the song "Frere Jacques" (I don't know the name of this song in English, but I am quite sure you know it too) my students use to learn the cases of dominus. Try it, it fits quite well.

What also helps is practicing in class and making it a game: the boys give the singular, the girls the plural or they conjugate a verb by starting with whispering and ending with shouting, which is also a lot of fun, but make sure your classroom is soundproof ;)

[April]

I have used Frere Jacque for 2nd declension for years as well.  Two of my students made up a goofy song for 1st declension.  I ended up putting the ending songs as mp3 files (its just me singing, so nothing special) on my school blog.  If you want to check them out, they are at:

http://blogs.spsk12.net/1403

[April]

I am totally going to steal that one! I think that my students will like it...

[Pam Koleszar]

I'm changing the way I think about mnemonics as I read children's books to my son. He loves the rhymes, even when they're silly, and the pictures are very important. I want to incorporate those elements into my teaching, without insulting the intelligence of my students. My first instinct is to teach vocabulary in this way, but I don't want to limit it to that. Ablative Absolutes, Indirect Statement, Conditional Sentences - surely all of these can be taught with some mnemonic help.

(Imagine this picture)
Noun and participle hand in hand
Can't stand alone, but the sentence can.

Accusative, infinitive, what do I see?
An indirect statement staring at me!

These are the poor products of a few minutes' thought. Is anyone else interested in this sort of thing? Anybody want to collaborate?

[April]

I actually think that that is a great idea.  I hadn't really attempted to make rhymes, but I will definitely try.

[Connor Hart]

anyone know the tune that goes:

M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E (Mickey Mouse [Donald Duck!]...)?

my high school Latin teacher often applied the tune to Latin, for instance:

A-AB-DE, CUM-EX-E, IN-PRO-PRAE-SUB-SINE (Mickus Mūs), to remember prepositions that take the ablative. I found that its nearly alphabetical order, warped slightly to help the rhyme scheme, really stuck with me and even found myself repeating i in college classes

when tutoring, I often scribbled this sentence onto the chalkboard to help students with remembering the vowel changes from indicative to subjunctive:

wE bEAt A gIAnt.