Special Education Mnemonic Strategies
The trend of incorporating students receiving special education services more into the general education classroom brings with it a challenge of providing these students with additional learning support. Mnemonic strategies can be used to enhance the learning experience for both special education and general education students. Mnemonic strategies are tools that use visual and verbal clues to help students retain important information, and they can be used in any subject area. The three main types of mnemonic strategies are: letter strategies, keywords and pegwords.
Letter Strategy
The sentence “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally” is often used to teach Order of Operations, or the order in which mathematical operations should be performed when evaluating expressions or equations. The first letter of each word of the sentence forms the word PEMDAS. This stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.
PEMDAS is an example of a mnemonic letter strategy. This strategy creates acronyms to help students recall a list of information in a specific order. The letters of the acronyms prompt students, and are associated with the first letter of each word in the list. Another popular example of a letter strategy is: “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” which helps students remember the order of planets in the solar system beginning with the one closest to the Sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto).
Sometimes letter strategies are simply words created using the first letter of each word from a list of information. For example “HOMES” can be used to help students remember the names of the American Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). Mnemonic letter strategies can also be made-up names such as “ROY G. BIV” to remember the colors of the spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).
Keyword Strategy
Keyword strategy involves connecting a new concept or word to prior knowledge using a word that triggers the memory of a specific image. This strategy often is used to remember new vocabulary words, and can be applied to any content area. In “Enhancing School Success with Mnemonic Strategies” the authors use the example of the word “barrister” to illustrate keyword mnemonic strategy. They connect “barrister” to the keyword “bear” and recommend imagining a picture of a bear acting like a lawyer. This assumes the students know the meaning of both “lawyer” and “bear” and that connecting the two with an image will help the students recall the new word, “barrister.”
Pegword Strategy
The Pegword strategy is used when trying to remember number information. It connects a number with a word that rhymes with the number. For example, the pegword for “one” might be “bun” and the pegword for “eight” might be “gate.” Students can imagine pictures incorporating a word or concept with the pegword to remember the number. For example, a student trying to remember that a spider has eight legs might imagine a picture of a spider on a gate.
Letter Strategy
The sentence “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally” is often used to teach Order of Operations, or the order in which mathematical operations should be performed when evaluating expressions or equations. The first letter of each word of the sentence forms the word PEMDAS. This stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.
PEMDAS is an example of a mnemonic letter strategy. This strategy creates acronyms to help students recall a list of information in a specific order. The letters of the acronyms prompt students, and are associated with the first letter of each word in the list. Another popular example of a letter strategy is: “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” which helps students remember the order of planets in the solar system beginning with the one closest to the Sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto).
Sometimes letter strategies are simply words created using the first letter of each word from a list of information. For example “HOMES” can be used to help students remember the names of the American Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). Mnemonic letter strategies can also be made-up names such as “ROY G. BIV” to remember the colors of the spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).
Keyword Strategy
Keyword strategy involves connecting a new concept or word to prior knowledge using a word that triggers the memory of a specific image. This strategy often is used to remember new vocabulary words, and can be applied to any content area. In “Enhancing School Success with Mnemonic Strategies” the authors use the example of the word “barrister” to illustrate keyword mnemonic strategy. They connect “barrister” to the keyword “bear” and recommend imagining a picture of a bear acting like a lawyer. This assumes the students know the meaning of both “lawyer” and “bear” and that connecting the two with an image will help the students recall the new word, “barrister.”
Pegword Strategy
The Pegword strategy is used when trying to remember number information. It connects a number with a word that rhymes with the number. For example, the pegword for “one” might be “bun” and the pegword for “eight” might be “gate.” Students can imagine pictures incorporating a word or concept with the pegword to remember the number. For example, a student trying to remember that a spider has eight legs might imagine a picture of a spider on a gate.
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