Simple Ideas for Memory Work in Morning Time

Hi, this is Sheri from the blog OurLifeHomeschooling.com, where I post homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. In this video, I'm going to be sharing some simple ideas for memory work in morning time. So a couple weeks ago, I did a post about morning time where I just talk about how I simplify our homeschool with morning time. Morning time is a time when all of your family can gather around and study the subjects that are easier to study in a group and some of the things that you want to get to, but they're kind of lost in the shuffle of math and some of your reading and writing and all of those main subjects, but things that are beautiful that inspire you, and morning time is a time to do that. So for our morning time, we have some things that we do daily and other things that we do regularly, and I like to loop them on a schedule. Memory work is something that we do daily because you have to kind of repeatedly hear something over and over again regularly for it to kind of get cemented in your brain. So memory work is something that we do daily. So why memorize anything when you can look things up? Just a simple Google search, you can find whatever information you're looking for. Memorizing things has really gone out of style in modern educational trends. It's not something that's really on the horizon. It's kind of considered something old school, something that you think like, you know, one room schoolhouse, they would memorize facts. That just seems like it's just outdated, but I have seen just such positive results from my own kids that it's something that we value and we like to make a part of our daily routine. It's short. We keep it, you know, just 15 minutes maybe of review, but I've just seen some great results from it to go. I was listening to a podcast by Pam Barnhill, Your Morning Basket, and she had a guest on Andrew Pudowa and he was talking about the value of memorizing. He told a great story that resonated with me. He talked about Frederick Douglass, who was born into what was probably one of the most dismal learning environments, just an illiterate environment. And when he gained his freedom from slavery, he became one of the greatest orders that our country has ever had. And the interesting thing about his story is that he, one of the first books that he ever had was a book of speeches, speeches by famous men from Greece. And he memorized these speeches. I thought that was so interesting that someone who was a great speaker had spent so much time when he was younger, memorizing speeches. He was probably picking up on a lot of vocabulary, just the form itself, seeing how good speech is formed. Also, I think science backs a case for memory work. You know, every time we're memorizing something, it's kind of connecting more and more pathways between our neurons and just making something more and more prominent. Especially for young kids, their brains are developing. And so, you know, when they're really young, they can't read. And so when you give them something that they have memorized, this is almost like reading for them before they can read. And, you know, my thing is they're going to be memorizing things anyway. You know, my kids constantly say the same lyrics to a certain song over and over again in their free time. And why not give them something of quality to memorize if they're going to be memorizing things anyway? This is a great time when they're young to give them a bank, just a foundation of information that they can draw from when they are writing as they're older or when they're speaking. So one thing that we memorize is scripture. I started out years ago when we first started memorizing scripture. I would just write the scripture down on an index card. And I had this little box that I would keep things in with tabs. And we had a pattern of pretty much just learning a new verse. We were always working on a new verse. And then next we would do a review verse. And as we kept adding more and more verses, I would make tabs and we would have a review verse, a different review verse for every day of the week. And then I would write, eventually that kind of grew, and I would put a tab for every day of the month. And so a verse would go behind that. We've used this system with tabs and putting a verse card behind each day of the week or each day of the month for a long time until, you know, we've been doing this for over ten years and our repertoire just grew. Now I have printed out all of our verses that we've memorized over the years and just put them in our morning time folders. But this was a great system, a great tool that we used for a long time. Another great thing for kids to memorize, especially young kids, is nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes are so valuable to young kids who can't read. When you're first learning language, there are sounds that we only make in the English language and sounds that, you know, in other languages we don't, you never hear and we never use with our mouth because it's just not something that's a part of our language. And when you hear, when a little child hears the same sounds and rhymes over and over again in a rhythm, it sticks in their head. It helps them to be able to learn how to say these sounds that we use in the English language and it just gives them like a jingle that they will just say over and over again. So with little children, we love to use nursery rhymes. Some of them we've learned by song and with motion, not all of them, but especially if you know some by song and you can put motions to it, they just get into it and you will see them later in the day, you know, acting out their nursery rhymes or singing them while they're coloring or whatever. Poetry is great for memory work. Poetry expands their vocabulary naturally without them ever even realizing it. And we like to memorize by poet. We've done it differently. We've done by poet. We've done just by some well-known poems. I feel like when they are memorizing poetry, the first time we read it, they may not really understand it. And it's the second, third, and fourth time that we are saying a poem that those words really sink in and that they really begin to grasp some of the vocabulary in the poems. For young kids, Christina Rossetti and Robert Louis Stevenson are great ones for them to memorize because I like their poems because they talk about concrete objects. We've memorized The Swing, The Cow by Robert Louis Stevenson. Christina Rossetti has one, Daffodil in Dilley. It's great in the spring because it's talking about the daffodils. These are things that they just see every day in their world, so they're great for them to memorize. Catechisms are great for kids to memorize. They're just a question and response. They're great because they teach them just the foundations of our faith in a way that makes it easy for them to understand. Some of the catechisms that we start with are, who made you? God. What else did God make? God made all things. Why did God make all things? For his own glory. And they go on and on with just some of the basic questions that would help them to understand the doctrines of what we believe. Grammar lists are also something that would be great to memorize. We start formal grammar lessons in about fourth grade, but if they're learning just like the subjective and objective pronouns, if they're learning the questions that you ask to find an adjective or an adverb, if they're learning the be verbs, when they get to their grammar lesson, it really helps them because they already have something there. They already know something about it. It gives them some prior knowledge. We love doing history songs. Our kids do history through Veritas self-paced history program, which is excellent. It's five years. Each year has a song. It starts chronologically from creation to ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, Explorers to 1815, and 1815 to modern times. And so each of the five years has a history song. And what I think about what I think is great about these is that they kind of have this memorized timeline in their head of events from creation to modern times. So whenever they learn a new historical event for the rest of their lives, they can kind of go back to this timeline that's already in their brains and put that event where it belongs in their chronological timeline that they have memorized. And I think that's so helpful. Math facts are also something that would be great to do in morning time. I kind of weave these into our morning time based on the season and usually just when I see that some of our kids need to sharpen up some of their skills. We teach multiplication through skip counting, you know, say your twos to 20, say your twos to 20 and back again, your threes to 30 and back again. And then we kind of expand that into, you know, what's two times three, what's three times five. And sometimes just doing this for a little bit every morning will really help sharpen their math skills. Some other things, random things, would just be memorizing like the precedents, the kings of Israel, the books of the Bible. You can memorize the planets, the oceans, the continents. There's so much that you can memorize together with your kids. I have more of this list at ourlifehomeschooling.com if you want to check out the post that I just published. If you are new to this channel and you like the content that I am putting out, would you do me a favor and subscribe to my YouTube channel or head on over to the blog and sign up to get my weekly newsletter and I can send this homeschooling encouragement straight to your inbox. See you next time.