Tag: remember

What to Memorize

“In terms of education, this means that the best way to communicate morality is not thorough endless dry lists of what should and should not be done, but once again through the imagination — through stories , drama, and living examples capable of engaging the will and the emotions and thus inspiring us to be better people” (Caldecott, Beauty in the Word 87).

These “living examples” are found in scripture, hymns, poetry, and folk songs, written by men and reflecting on their experiences.  We learn to be better humans by meditating on the words of those who have gone before us. The captured emotion and carefully chosen words convey ideas in such a way that they are easily brought to mind later.


Scripture: Hiding God’s word in your heart (and in your kids’ hearts) is a way to always have it with you

Poetry: A storehouse of beautiful words beautifully said makes a better reader and a better writer. This storehouse challenges what words sound good and challenges the owner to choose his words carefully when speaking or writing.

Hymns: Great hymns of the church, whether they are ancient or recent, tend to declare Biblical truths in a memorable and accessible way.

Folk Songs: Folk songs connect us to the past through music. These songs typically tell stories that are timeless and not to be forgotten, fleshing out entries on a timeline or stories in a history book into a retelling of real life.

Other things to consider memorizing:

  • Classical Conversations Foundations memory work
  • Speeches from famous leaders
  • Multiplication facts
  • Spelling and Punctuation Rules
  • Foreign language vocabulary or grammar rules

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Why Memory Work?

 

One afternoon, I rode behind my husband on an ATV up a mountain path. We wove through shadows, around trees, and past wildflowers until we burst into sunshine and this vista spread out before us. A song memorized long ago sprang from my lips, “To God be the glory, great things He has done!” In my childhood, this was our music minister’s favorite hymn. He’s roll the R on the “great” as if he were singing in his native Spanish. That is still how I hear it in my head.

On another afternoon, a few years before, I sat next to Isaac’s bed in the PICU with no words of my own. In my desperation to cling to hope in spite of the prognosis we’d just received, I clung to other long-ago memorized words, “Even as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me. Your Rod and your Staff, they comfort me.”

Repeatedly, when I have no words of my own, it is phrases written by others, but stored in my mind, that come forth to express hope or faith or even desperation. These experiences are what convince me that it is necessary to hide words of Truth and Beauty in the hearts of my children as well as in my own heart. These words provide a link to the past, a reminder that we aren’t alone in our experiences… that others before us have felt like we do, have had similar thoughts, and written similar stories. These words remembered, whether light verse or heavy hymn, remind us that God is. That He, mighty and sovereign, lovingly holds His creations in His hands, while His Word moves mountains for our good and His glory.

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How and When and Where to Memorize

We each have a memory work notebook, and we just work through the day’s stuff together. Each day we will visit the daily tab, even or odd according to the date, the day of the week, and the date. This isn’t my original idea, but I morphed Sonya Shafer’s plan for a memory work box into this notebook.

It takes about twenty-five minutes if we all keep our happy hearts and just do the job. If I take a phone call or answer a text, the routine is broken and everyone is cranky. If we follow the rails of habit we have created, all is well, and we move on to the Loop of Beautiful Things and then our individual studies.

Even though each boy has a notebook and turns pages to keep on track with where we are, only one of the three strictly follows each line and reads every word aloud until he doesn’t need to anymore.  That’s the one who remembers what he SEES (like I do). Another remembers what he HEARS, and he mostly listens and recites along, looking down at his page as he stumbles. The third is constantly moving as we work through the material… tapping or bouncing as he recites. He isn’t distracting, but he isn’t still. It is the movement that helps him remember.

Keep in mind that my youngest is ten years old. I’ve been using the same methods for morning time for the last four years, and for most of that time all of my boys have been readers. If I were going to memorize as a group with children who could not yet read fluently, I’d have to change my methods. There was a time when I was the only one with a notebook. Then, I would read a line or sentence, and they would recite it back to me. Or we would sing together, and the songs would quickly become familiar. We accomplished less material in a year, only switching up poems, hymns, scripture and songs every twelve weeks or so.

But there is a lot of progress that is made in those little bits. Every line learned makes the next easier and adds to the storehouse of language in the mind – new images, vocabulary, phrases.
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Coming soon: Memory Work Printable Packs

I am sure you have noticed that my family’s school day is heavily dependent on our morning meeting time, now dubbed “Council of Oaks,” and on memory work. We add to our family culture and furnish the rooms of our minds with beautiful words beautifully said from scripture, poetry, hymns, and folk songs.

I am building a series of printable packs for the memory work we will do this year. If you want to join us, you can download a pack for a couple of dollars and print it off for your Memory Work Binder.  All of this year’s memory work will be part of the American Feast I will spread for my children to go along with the Cycle 3 Memory Work from Classical Conversations Foundations Guide. (No information from the guide will be in the download. These pieces are related, but separate.) I have a solid plan for each four to six week section of the year, and each pack will have a resource page available. (The page for August is here.)

If I accomplish all that I have in my head, you also may get cursive copywork for these poems and American history related book lists. It all is dependent on how fast I can get ideas on paper the screen.

Rule #3: Remember

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In our home, we have two particular habits that help us remember what we have learned and where we have been. Those two habits are memory work and narration.

Every school morning after chores and breakfast, we cozy up on fluffy couches with books and memory work notebooks and my second cup of coffee. Everyone is in favor of me having a second cup of coffee, but I don’t make them all special hot drinks at this point in the day.

I set a timer for twenty-five minutes, and we work our way through the day’s sections in our memory work notebook. We aim to finish what is in each section before the time beeps. If we don’t goof off too much, we can just make it.  If I allow myself to be distracted, we don’t make it.

Our memory work notebook includes Bible verses. We hide chunks of scripture in our hearts. It also contains hymns from the hymnal our tiny church uses. We learn at least one poem from each poet we study (about four each year), and we learn the poems from IEW’s Linguistic Development through Poetry series. There are folk songs from my childhood that my kids otherwise wouldn’t know, like “Oh, Susanna!” that are culturally or historically relevant, and patriotic songs, such as “America the Beautiful.” Because we are a part of Classical Conversations, my younger boys’ Foundations memory work is in the binder also.

That sounds like a lot to memorize, doesn’t it? There are several things to keep in mind as you read this.  First of all, we didn’t just start out with this amount of memory work overnight. We’ve been adding to this particular binder for two years, and before that, I was keeping track of what we memorized more haphazardly. Secondly, each month, there are only three or four new things to learn.  Everything else is review. Finally, when the timer beeps, we quit. Occasionally, we are really close to being done with the day’s review when we are interrupted, and in that case, we might go ahead and finish. But, the rule is to stop and close the notebook when the time is up.

Narration is much simpler. It is really just developing a habit of telling a story of something that you read or experienced. We tell a lot of stories around here.

Some stories we find in books.  When we read aloud, someone always has to tell back the story we read. Since we tend to read from several books in the same thirty or forty minutes, I pick up a book and ask, “Now where were we in this story?” and a boy sets the scene while I find the page, and we all settle in to hear what happens next.

Some stories are tales of our own adventures. These usually start with “Remember when…?”. Occasionally, we flip though a family photo album and talk about the boys when they were younger. We’ll remember together the day a brother fell in the pond at the pack and the day another brother sunk a winning basket in a great game. We’ll remember when Daddy got his seminary degree and when the baby was here for only a few months. We tell our own stories, and some of those are tied to the calendar. We talk about births on birthdays and deaths on Glory Days and our wedding on our anniversary.

Some are family stories. We tell cautionary tales about the time Grandma almost lost her hand to a gar while fishing in an Oklahoma lake. We tell stories of familial entrepreneurial success and failure, of remodeling success and of appliances breaking, of beautiful old cars and of automobile accidents that may have been preventable. Where there are people, there are stories, and those stories beg to be told and retold. Beautiful words in hymns and poetry beg to be remembered and imitated, sometimes unknowingly. If all things are to be compared with the plumb line that is Christ, then we must tuck the truth of scripture away in our minds so that we can find it easily when we need it. We are formed by our memories, and so we must choose to remember.

What is a Rule of Six? How did I find it?

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A Rule of Six isn’t fancy. It is just six words or ideas that you want to meet regularly. It isn’t intended to make you tired or to be a judgment on whether you had a good day or not. A Rule of Six is meant to bring rest – to allow you to keep the Main Thing the Main Thing because you know what the Main Things are for your family. You won’t be as tempted to go chasing after every new curricula that pops up after you know what works in your house, and what is important to your family.

I am not completely sure of the origins of the Rule of Six, but I first read about it in 2007. That was a crazy year around here.  You see, we have five sons. Our oldest son, Danny, died when he was five years old in 2005 due to a nasty genetic disorder. That left my husband and I and Micah, preschooler. And then we had babies in 2006, 2007 and 2009. So, in 2007, I was struggling to recover from my own grief, help my husband and Micah recover from theirs, home educate that now-kindergarten-aged boy, and care for our almost Irish twins (our double blessing boys, Josiah and Gideon, who arrived 14 months apart). I was exhausted. I went searching for ways to simplify, and I found the idea of the Rule of Six appealing, but I was too overwhelmed at that moment to really think it through.

I was reading Ann Voskamp’s A HolyExperience daily because I had found that counting blessings was the only way to crawl out of the grief hole into which I had (quite understandably) been sucked. I was intrigued when Ann posted a list of Seven Daily Rungs that her homeschool hung on. That was back before she was famous, but after she started keeping her One Thousand Gifts list. You’ll find that post here: http://www.aholyexperience.com/2007/05/way-of-holistic-homeschool-seven-daily/.

Then I found the idea again on Elizabeth Foss’s blog as I continued my search for holistic education ideas. She wrote about a Rule of Six in 2006 and 2007 and likely some other times also. These were simply six things that she was striving to give her children daily. Those posts are here:  http://ebeth.typepad.com/reallearning/2006/10/rule_of_six.html and here: http://ebeth.typepad.com/reallearning/2007/05/revisiting_the_.html  (If you haven’t read Elizabeth Foss’s book, Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home, please do. Especially if you are in the season of many small children, she has some practical advise and curricula ideas for the first eight school years, as well as ways to avoid burnout.)

Elizabeth Foss led me back to Melissa Wiley, here: http://melissawiley.com/blog/2006/10/26/my-rule-of-six-and-whence-it-came/. Melissa Wiley had her own (different) six things that she plans for her family.

All three ladies had different rules of six, but they had the same purpose – to bring peace and efficiency to their home educating homes that allowed them both structure and freedom as they created family life and wrote books and blogs and articles while they were at it.

Much more recently (after multiple rounds of simplifying and making our homeschool look like I want it to), Sarah Mackenzie, who hosts the Read Aloud Revival Podcast over at http://amongstlovelythings.com and who also wrote the little guide Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler’s Guide to Unshakable Peace, did a Master’s Class to help her members sort out a way to decide what is the most important things for their own homes.  (If you join the Read Aloud Revival membership site, you can watch the recording of this class and several others)

After watching the catch-up video of the first in the two class series, I hurriedly scratched down six words that are things we have been trying for in our house. I finally grasped that I wasn’t supposed to take someone else’s idea of what would be good for this house of boys (now 8, 9, and 13) and their author-editor-publisher-parents. I needed to write what would work for us. And I needed to start with what is currently working and see where that leads. So, that is what I did.

I suggest you try it also. (I’ll explain more about why I chose the words I chose in the next few posts).