Memory Strategy for Timelines

Hi.  I wanted to share a short post showing how important it is to anchor all information that will be needed for a test (and hopefully for long-term recall!)  The images are pretty small, but if you click on them, they pop up larger.
This student was required to recall not only the  events leading up to the Revolutionary War, but also the dates.  He tried to simply “memorize” them, but he kept choosing the wrong dates for each event.  We created a visual timeline and, because he has benefited from using rhyme in the past, we created rhymes to connect the dates and the events when we could.

In the second section, I used another strategy–ANYthing to get the information to stick! The student had to recall two facts about 1775, and we couldn’t think of very much for this one, so I broke down what he had to remember into syllables, making it fit so that the first one had seven syllables (i.e., The-Bat-tle-of-Lex-ing-ton = 7) and the second had five syllables (i.e., Bat-tle-of-Con-cord = 5) for 1775.  We would love to hear from you teachers, tutors and parents, about strategies you are using!