An anonymous visitor recently left a comment with some questions about memory work:
"... I've actually been wanting to do this with my children but have not known how to go about it. First off how old is your daughter? I have 4 boys and the oldest is 7. How do you get the memorization done? Can you post a little step by step process? Thanks"
First of all, thanks for stopping by my blog and commenting! My daughter is 10.5 as of this writing. We've been doing memory work since first grade. Actually, if you think about it, we've been doing it since birth. Mimicking my sounds, learning words, learning nursery songs, finger plays, and other little silly typical toddler time activities. But formally, I'd say this is our 5th year.
Currently all the pieces she's memorized are kept in a 3-prong folder, in sheet protectors. That is getting rather full nowadays so I'll be moving that all to a soft-side binder sometime soon.
Her first pieces were from First Language Lessons from Peacehill Press. However, I quickly found she had a knack for memorization and she wanted longer pieces. Additionally, I found that some of the pieces in FLL were abridged or revised and I wanted her working with original sources.
You can read an earlier post of mine about how memory work (poems) are selected, if desired.
Nowadays, she's not only memorizing poetry but has been memorizing historical facts and parts of documents. Currently she's working on an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence. The language is this document has required a dictionary (to better understand content) as well as more effort just to get the lines memorized. It didn't surprise me, however, that she's managed to speed through the basic ground-work memorization. Now she's just working on phrasing and other areas requiring a bit of polishing.
So, you ask... "How do you get the memorization done? Can you post a little step by step process?"
Well, as I mentioned, start small. Whether you're memorizing short poems or short lines of scripture, keep it short. The language used should also be somewhat simple to begin with. Your child's vocabulary level/skill will be the determining factor in that.
When my daughter was just starting out we'd read through the piece 3-4 times a day, during our homeschooling time. Once I started to notice that she either wasn't looking at the paper much or began to speak quicker than I was, that's when I'd start asking for recitation from memory. One line (or maybe just a couple words) at a time. Then we'd either read the rest from the paper, or maybe try for more from memory. Eventually, as days go on, the piece is memorized.
Nowadays, I usually assign a new selection of memory work and have her read through it to herself a few times (perhaps 2x each day for oh, two days.) Then, she reads it to herself 1x followed by reading it outloud to me. This goes on for a couple of days or until she says she wants to "give it a try." (She is usually the one jumping the gun and wants to try from memory.) Again, depending on the language and phrasing of the piece she may only get a few lines from memory recited, or may work her way through a whole stanza with little prompting.
This continues- her reading the entire piece to herself then working on the memory recitation to me- until the whole piece is able to be recited straight through. Once she's gotten about halfway through a piece, however, I've found that the second half goes MUCH quicker than it was to memorize the first half. I really believe the continued reading of the ENTIRE piece during the memory process is key to this.
Now, you may be wondering how the pieces she's previously memorized are handled. As "new" ones are finished they get added to the "old" ones and are put through a rotation. She works on two or three "old" ones each day (along with the current piece.) Those that are more recently added are rotated through more often. Those that are "old hat, old timers" are done less frequently, but still regularly. You can see the current schedule of rotation with this image:
 Notice Patrick Henry's speech is listed three times in the rotation.
It is the most recently added "old piece." As more pieces are added the rotation
will grow longer and the frequency of various pieces will change.
She has her favorites. Sea Song is one she memorized as a requirement for one of the Girl Scout badges she worked on and she's often asking to do that one. Me, I happen to love the two pieces by James Whitcomb Riley. The Cow by Robert Louis Stevenson, an earlier piece, is one that always causes laughter due to the image I used on the printed page for her notebook.
Anyway, I hope this answers your questions, at least enough to get started. Truly, I don't think you can really do anything WRONG with memory work other than perhaps pushing your child too quickly through a piece. We get much enjoyment during memory work time, and I think as long as that is always the case, then all is well.
Now if I could just get it together long enough to add some more recitation audios to my blog! *sigh* LOL |
Untitled Comment
I may try this.