I’ve decided to get organized! By that I mean that it’s time to put the verses I’ve been learning for the past three years, as well as the verses I learned as a child, into an organizational system that will help me systematically review them. Review and retention go hand in hand; if the words are in your memory but you can’t retrieve them---it doesn’t do you much good. According to my daughter, who took a cognitive psychology course last summer, we have to keep the pathways open so that retrieval is easy. And the only way to keep those mental pathways open is to……(drumroll, please)… REVIEW.
I found myself in Office Max today, looking for the perfect organizational tools---a card file box and 41 cards with tabs. I found the boxes, but none of them was particularly inspirational with color or design; there were laminated tabbed index cards as well, but they were pre-labeled A-Z, and I want to create my own labels, so I ended up looking but not buying.
According to Charlotte Mason, a British educator who lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s and whose educational philosophies and materials are popular with many homeschooling families today, with her method of review (which you can see at http://simplycharlottemason.com/timesavers/memorysys/), you can keep hundreds of verses fresh in your memory. I’m hoping to prove her right.
Here is how it works: Label one card Daily, another Odd, a third Even, the next seven cards with the days of the week (Sunday, Monday, etc.), and the last 31 cards from one to thirty-one. Place the cards in the file box in the above order.
The verse that you are currently trying to commit to memory gets filed behind Daily and you work on it every day. After you can say it well, file it behind either Odd or Even. Then, as you are learning a new verse, on odd days you will review the verse behind the Odd guide card and on even days the verse behind the Even guide card. When the newest Daily card is ready to be advanced to Odd or Even, take the card already in that spot and place it behind a day of the week card. As the days of the week get filled up with cards, then one at a time they can be advanced to the numbered cards.
As your card file box gets filled up with verse cards, you will end up working on four verses per day---the newest verse (Daily), an Odd or Even verse, a Day of the Week verse, and a Day of the Month verse. For example, today is Wednesday, October 5; I would look at my Daily verse, the Odd verse, the Wednesday verse, and the verse behind the card number 5.
The beauty of this system is that after you have memorized a verse, you still review it for a time every other day, then once a week, and eventually once a month.
If you already have a set of verses memorized, just start out by placing them behind the numbered tabbed cards and plan to review one a day.
And no, I am not planning to take apart any of my precious spirals; I will rewrite the verses on new and colorful note cards—which will provide me with a good review in and of itself.
Now, if I can just find the perfect set of tabbed cards and an attractive card file box...........
