Beth's Meditations on Memory Work

I found a wonderful new blogging friend, Beth from Pages of our Life. I want to make sure that you all know how much time Beth has spent giving us a beautiful look into her Classical approach to education. She was inspired by the CC practicum, and has outlined it beautifully in numerous posts from July 18-25. Here is just a bit to whet your appetite. Please note...I am stealing this info...yes, plagiarism at its finest. :) I figured, why reinvent the wheel when she has done it SO beautifully.
Thank you, Beth. We are officially adopting you into our NC group.
Meditations on Memory Work

I had a lightbulb moment on the importance

of memorization as a Tool in learning!

Do you see this poor lady? Do you think she can find the paper that she needs when she needs it? It came to me that this is how our brains look when we have stored lots of info into it. Let's say we have learned about an entire time period of history. All the info is swiriling around in our heads. We know we learned about it but we have trouble retrieving the info when we need it.

Well when a child memorizes a timeline it is like creating "organized file folders" in the brain. All of the info has somewhere to go. This makes it easier to find the info and pull it out when you need it. You will have to think on this one for a while. When I have combined the tool of memorization with a subject my retention is greater and I can actually retrieve things faster. It is easier to see the big picture. I also find that when I do not use the tool of memorization with my kids that the things we studied tend to get "lost" and fade away.

Let me clarify that I am not talking about memorizing every little fact and detail but a skeleton of the subject we are studying.

For example:

1. In History the skeleton is our timeline

2. In Math it is the definitions and drills

3. For Grammar it is Definitions of all the parts of speech, preposition lists etc.