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Here Come The Meatballs!
A Lesson In Mnemonics
by Jennie vonEggers

"HERE COME THE MEATBALLS!!", my three year old shouted as we drove through our hometown street.

I thought that an odd statement to make completely out of the blue and asked him why he had said it. In typical three-year-old fashion, he was unable to tell me. Fortunately for me, his older brothers knew what his comment meant and why he had made it.

Apparently, about a week prior, we had been driving the same road as my two older boys discussed whose turn it was to choose the sandwich at Subway. The boy with that days choosing rights was informing the other that he would be ordering the meatball sandwich, like it or not. And, just to taunt the non-meatball liking brother even more, he said, "HERE COME THE MEATBALLS!"

Fast forward one week later. As we drove past the exact same spot where the original comment was made, my 3 year old remembered and repeated it. His mind was triggered to recall the meatball comment by a particular location, which happened to be an RV place alongside the road. Now, this comes from a kid who can't remember the name of the town we live in!

As the co-author of a mnemonic based learning tool, I was particularly intrigued to realize that my 3 year old was using "mnemonics" without even knowing it. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term "mnemonics" it is just a fancy word for the process in which the brain is triggered to remember something by association.

This got me thinking, is all learning based on "mnemonics" at some level? And, if we incorporated more mnemonic-style teaching methods, wouldn't our children have better retention of new information?

Following are two examples of different teaching methods, one that was successful and one that was not:

Our family was approaching a cross country move to the deep south. As any good homeschooling Mom worth her salt would, I saw this as a great opportunity to teach about the Civil War. We cracked open a history book, read, looked at pictures and discussed the main aspects of the war. A few days later when I quizzed them about what they had learned they seem to draw a complete blank.

I can now see why they didn't retain the information. They had no association in their current "world" with the past world of the Civil War, to make it stick in their minds. As a result of my kids' failure to learn, I decided to teach them about the Civil War again, this time using a whole new approach.

Involving my nieces, nephews and lots of household props we created our own play, acting out the timeline of the war. They loved it and you can bet they remembered it days later when I quizzed them.

The moral? The next time your child seems stumped or just isn't "getting" something the way you'd like, try and find an alternative way of teaching. Find a way that they can relate to and associate the information with what is relevant to their world. Find that "trigger". Heck, my kids can't look at a cotton ball without thinking about those poor cotton pickers years ago. Did I mention they had to pick cotton balls off the floor?

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