A Memorization box!

Fina has been memorizing a bunch of poetry and a few passages from Shakespeare plays.  I was trying to figure out how to keep track of what she knew, so that I'd be able to have her review them regularly. While we were only memorizing from A Child's Garden of Verses, I was using bookmarks to keep track of the poems she had memorized, so I could find them easily. With Shakespeare, I had printed out the passages she learned and kept them with my clipboard for easy access. Now we have moved on to our second book of poetry, A.A. Milne's When We Were Very Young.  How to keep track of those, while still referring back to the first poetry book? Now that Fina has memorized more items, it has become apparent to me that I need a better system.

Brandy's (from afterthoughtsblog.net) blog post about memorization popped into my inbox just at the right time!  (I definitely enjoy Brandy's blog postings. She is a CM mom and she has great ideas about a lot of stuff!)

She used to use a memory binder system, but it was becoming too unruly for her. So she moved to a memorization box system.  There are many versions of this neat idea, of a memorization box, but basically you use recipe cards and a recipe card box. And dividers. And you do a memorization box.

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On a side note: 

I had actually already seen this concept a while back from SimplyCharlotteMason as a Scripture Memory System.  SCM has you set up the dividers like this, just for bible verses:

Daily, Odd, Even, Days of the week, numbered 1-31

It seemed a little complicated for me, though I get the point. You start your first verse in daily. Once it is learned, you put it to the odd and others to the even. Once they are really good (by doing them every other day on odd days), you spread them out to Sunday-Saturday. Then you spread them out to the numbered days. Within a few months, you could do this, for example today (Wednesday, January 27). You read the card in your daily tab, one in odd, one in Wednesday, and the one in 27.  This system keeps you reviewing your already memorized verses.

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Brandy has it set up differently. It allows her to incorporate more than just bible verses in the memory box. She sets up her dividers this way: 

Daily, and then categories (songs, poems, scripture, government docs, catechism, Misc., and Christmas).

She does all the daily ones (the ones they are learning) and then one from each category as review of old things. She uses a post-it flag to mark her spot in each category. As the daily things are learned, each one gets moved to the back of the appropriate divider.

(Brandy used to do the following dividers: daily, even, odd, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and everything would be randomly mixed in together. Which could work too.)

You could change up your dividers to suit you. I'm thinking one divider for a Child's Garden of Verses poems, so we review them all frequently. One for Shakespeare. One for our new poetry we are working on right now from A.A. Milne's When We Were Very Young. And maybe one for hymns. And one for scripture. And maybe something intermediary between daily and moving it out completely. Maybe odd and even. Just so that the new thing gets a bit more practice. Or calling it this week and reviewing it all week before moving it out?

I'd encourage you to check out afterthoughtsblog.net for ideas of what to memorize as well.  I think I'll start with her scripture verses. I have been wanting to do scripture memorization with Fina, but I'm the type of person that needs a good list to start from, rather than just picking things willy-nilly. I think an Awana list would totally help us!

I'm not sure yet what I'll do with my dividers, but I've started writing out our memorization on cards, and I have a box and dividers ready to go!