Remember Anything

One of the very first things parents want their kids to know is their phone number. The problem is, many children have trouble memorizing and need extra help with the process. In fact, I have a very smart son who, when you ask him for an overview of a book he just read will give you tell you the whole story with all the details the book gave him. But, ask him to memorize numbers and you start to wonder if it is the same kid. It just isn’t going to happen.

Then, I found a solution…

I decided to try mnemonics with the phone numbers.  The trick is, you can’t use the same techniques we use to train adults.  It has to be simple, and make sense.  There are several possibilities.  Some mnemonic techniques use rhymes.  Others associate the shape of the letter with an object.  I decided to use the shape method.

You might find other shape associations, but these are the shapes I taught him.
0 – egg
1 – tower
2 – swan
3 – bird (look at it sideways)
4 – sailboat
5 – hook
6 – golf club
7 – cliff or waterfall
8 – snowman
9 – balloon

It should take you about 5 minutes to teach your child these shapes.

The next step was to create a story that used these numbers in sequence.

Assuming your number is 272-1784 (no one’s number that I know of) you could create a story like this.

One morning a swan woke up and walked to the edge of the cliff that his nest was perched on.  Off in the distance, he saw another swan perched on a tower in the nearby city which was balanced on the edge of another cliff.  Being a lonely swan, he decided to fly off to the city to visit this other swan and warn him that he was nesting in a very dangerous location.  As he left his perch, in the valley below, he noticed a snowman sailing a sailboat.  Seeing two strange sites in one morning was too much for him so he stayed home.

OK.. so it isn’t a particularly good story.  But, I bet you can remember the phone number now .

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