Science for 6th grade: Memorizing The Planets Through Singing and Drawing

Since I was young, I’m really bad in memorizing anything. I need to read my textbook at least 10 times. When I was in college, the materials that I learned had improved as well as the time I need to spend to memorize it. 100 is the biggest number of me to repeat the same thing over and over again just to make sure i’ll understand those aliens words, it mostly happened when the exam days came. But the most unbearable thing was, my brain didn’t really care how much effort did I make, or how long it took, this arrogance brain will forget everything right in time, after I read the first word of the exam sheet. It irritated me a lot!

Now, as a teacher, I really won’t let my students have the same experience as me. I need to find a simple, fun, yet effective way in memorizing. I used the planets topic as my experiment. Days before, I was asking some of junior and high school department students whether they remember the planets in the solar system that they have studied when they were in the 6^th grade. Just one student out of 10 remembered the planets order, few of them knew the name with no order. And most of them even forgot some of the planets. To solve this I tried to find the way so that my current students in 6^th grade won’t forget this topic as the upper classes did. One method that I can find in internet was memorizing through singing. Stefan Koelsch in Brain and Music Journal (2012) said:

“Listening to music, and music making, engages a large array of psychological

processes, including perception and multimodal integration, attention, learning

and memory, syntactic processing and processing of meaning information, action,

emotion, and social cognition”

To obtain good result, I combined the singing with the drawing and coloring activity, we call it memorizing through visual; when the eye can learn. We can just picturing the shape and the oder one by one in the brain whenever we recall the memory. luckily the students created such fun choreography as well, so that not only brain and visual, but also storing the memory in the body (The body memory). We can see the result in this video bellow….

Right after that day, i often see them making fun of the choreography while singing the songs. I assume that this song really got into them. They smoothly remember the planets order just like they remember the alphabet.