This is a trivial thing, I guess, but I’m happy with how it works out, so I’m sharing it.
Every other chapter of Lively Latin contains about twenty vocabulary words and grammar chants to memorize. We follow the curriculum directions to make flash cards on index cards cut in half, and to review vocabulary for three minutes at the beginning of each lesson. By the middle of the book, we were juggling a lot of cards – and having trouble organizing our review in a systematic way.
Enter my HIGH TECH FILING SYSTEM.
I hole-punched the corner of each card and divided them into six piles: one for the front and the back of each of the three rings in Alex’s Latin binder. Each group is one day’s review. If she misses a word, I slip that card off the ring and move it down to the top of the next day’s ring. That way, hard words get daily practice until she knows them.
Each time we get a new set of cards, I sort them into six piles and add them to the top of each group. That way, the first cards reviewed every day are the ones she’s practiced the least. If we don’t get through the whole pile, the ones we skip are the most practiced words at the bottom.
I am the kind of person who would forget which ring we’re supposed to be on, so I wrote out the numbers 1-6 a few times on an index card and stuck it in the binder pocket. Every time we review the cards I cross out a number.
This method works for us because it doesn’t require me to keep track of anything extra, like a file box of flash cards. It’s all right there in the Latin book. It’s also helpful that everything gets reviewed in an orderly way – we don’t skip the oldest words week after week because “surely she knows them.” Not sure what we’ll do with the old words when we graduate to Lively Latin 2, but for now, this is working for us.
How do you handle memorization?
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