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 6th 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 6th 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.
Nobody will said science is not fun and boring anymore after reading and watching this.
BalasHapus