4th Grade Math Vocabulary

I discovered something mind-blowing while teaching in school last week.  It will change the way I teach forever.  It is simple and any brave teacher can give it a try with her students tomorrow.  It will allow you to teach more content faster than you ever thought possible.  It took me three weeks of playing around with but it worked so well that I have to share it with all teachers.  You will not believe this works, but encourage all teachers to give it a try.  It will enliven you classroom and empower your students.  

For about six months I have been intensively studying memory training, mainly do to the fact that because of my own three young children (who I have been putting to bed each night while my wife is working on her PHD) and teaching 4th graders all day long, I feel like my brain is turning to mush.  It seems like my brain had been straining to focus on really simple things and one day I forgot how to spell a word that I had known how to spell all my life.  I decided my brain needed more stimulation, so started researching and exploring memorization techniques.  

I starting using certain memorization techniques that I had read about and they worked amazingly well.  I can now memorize an the order of random deck of playing cards in a few minutes.  This is crazy.  If you would have told me I could do this a few months ago, I would have said you were crazy, but I can do it and it is not really that hard.  I am saying that you can shuffle a deck of cards and flip them over one-by-one and I can tell you the order of the cards.  I can tell you the order in 10 minutes, the next day, or a week from now.  I know you might be saying that it is not possible for you to do something like that but it is possible for you to do it.  It is actually super easy and fun!  Obviously, memorizing a deck of playing cards is totally useless other than to work out your brain, but, as a 4th grade teacher, I instantly saw the potential for the techniques I was using to help my students learn information faster than I had ever thought possible.  

My first experiment

Ok, these techniques worked for me, but could they help my students, 4th graders, retain important information, information that would help them master say math terms for the common core curriculum?  I was super excited to find out.  My first test was this.  I would teach the students some math vocabulary using these memory tricks and then I would test my lowest performing students to see if it helped them to learn.  I am talking about the students with no support at home, the students who don't care, the students who are not intrinsically motivated to learn.  I thought if these techniques work for them, I am on to something amazing.  

The night before I was going to try my experiment, I wrote down 13 math vocabulary words, 13 math prefixes to be more specific and I came up with a little story that connected each one of the words using memory techniques.  The next day, I took 10 minutes of class time to tell the story.  It was fun.  The students were engaged, they laughed at the silly parts, but would they remember the terms.  I breifly reviewed the story and then waited.  A few days later, I gave a quiz on the terms.  Everyone in the class got a 100.  I couldn't believe it.  I have been teaching for more than 16 years and I have never had the entire class get a 100.  I knew that I had to dive in for more.  I plan on sharing the amazing things that have been happening in my classroom over the last few weeks.  

I had already been exploring creative ways of using memory in my classroom.  I have been using mindmapping and creative notetaking techniques with my class for years, but when I added this simple technique to what I had already been doing the results were amazing.