Tag: memory work

April 16, 2016 Morning Basket, Our Faith, Uncategorized Post a Comment

Memorize the Beatitudes – More Helpful Hints!

Are you having a hard time memorizing the Beatitudes? We find that getting them in order is a real challenge. So we came up with a mnemonic device to help us. And we want to share it with you! And just to help you out, I turned it into a free printable.  Because I'm awesome like that. 

Remember back in elementary school when we learned about the order of the planets and we all learned that "My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas?" Apparently these days the very intelligent mother serves nachos because Pluto isn't a real planet anymore. But whatever. The point is, we memorized that sentence and - BAM! - we knew the order of the planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

So we came up with a couple of sentences to help us get the beatitudes in order. Helen, in typical Helen fashion, offered up a sentence about monsters and mopping up poop. I rejected that one, but you should feel free to make up your own sentence if mine is too boring for you. 

Because there are so many beatitudes, we have three sentences. Or two sentences and a sentence fragment if you want to get technical about it. Here they are:

Please make me ham and mashed potatoes. Pretty please? I prefer eating red raspberry pie. 

The printable below shows you how these sentences match up to the beatitudes. 

This little ditty, along with the slides I posted before, are really helping us with our goal of memorizing the Beatitudes. Our goal is to master them by the end of the Easter season. 

Click the image below to get the newest free printable!

April 7, 2016 Morning Basket, Our Faith Post a Comment

Memorize the Similes of Salt and Light – More Free Printables!

Are you having fun with the Beatitudes Memorization Printable? Well, I have some more printable goodness for you.

As I mentioned in my last post, we are working on memorizing Matthew Chapter 5, AKA The Sermon on the Mount, or as my husband calls it, How to be a Christian - In a Nutshell. The Beatitudes are the first big chunk of that. And they're surprisingly challenging to memorize which is why you really want to check out that post for tips and tools to get it done.

The Similes of Salt and Light come after the Beatitudes, and they are much simpler to memorize. In fact, they'd make a great place to start with scripture memorization. And I've made it even easier with these printables.

Here's how it works. I've broken the verses into bite-sized pieces and paired each piece with a memorable picture. The picture helps anchor the text in your brain. You'll start by going through the slides with pictures and the texts printed on them. Once you feel like you're ready, you'll switch to the pictures only. And once that's easy, you go without the aids.

You don't actually have to print the pictures. You can just scroll through the slides on your computer if that makes more sense for you.

It's unbelievably satisfying to hear children reciting scripture. Especially cute 5-year-old boys.

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Gratuitous picture of my cute boys. And my messy kitchen.

So now, without further ado. Here are the magic memory slides. For more details on how to use them, please refer to the previous post.

 

Matthew 5:13 - Pictures and Words

Matthew 5:13 - Pictures Only

Matthew 5: 14-15 - Pictures and Words

Matthew 5: 14-15 Pictures Only

March 28, 2016 Morning Basket, Our Faith Post a Comment

Memorize the Beatitudes – with a free printable!

Earlier this year I set us the ambitious task of memorizing Matthew Chapter 5 as part of our Morning Basket Time.

Having grown up Protestant, my fist inclination was to search for a song. The scripture songs I memorized as a kid are still with me and I can still recite 1 John 4:7-8 because of the Psalty Song.

 

So naturally, I began my search on YouTube for Beatitude songs. I found some fun ones, but they weren’t really working for us as far as actually memorizing the verses went.

In my search, I stumbled across an amazing resource by Bible Buffet which uses the trick of pairing words to pictures to help you memorize lengthy passages. This guy has put together an amazing resource and we worked our way through his videos with a decent amount of success.

But we hit a snag when we tried to review it. I’ve found that depending on YouTube during morning time is not always a good idea at our house. Kids tune out, or we get distracted by other videos, or the technology doesn’t work for some stupid reason. I wanted to print the pictures used in Bible Buffet’s videos so that we could review them quickly and easily.

I did actually contact the channel’s owner to ask if he had the pictures on file. Sadly, he does not.

I told my kids I was going to put together pictures to help us review the Beatitudes and I asked them if they wanted me to use the original pictures (Bible Buffet suggested I could do screen shots of the images), or if they wanted me to create new pictures. They voted new pictures.

I believe one of the reasons the original pictures didn’t stick for us is because one face blurred into another. The images were 100% appropriate and captured the tone of the scripture passages perfectly. But they weren’t exactly memorable. In my version, the images are all clip art. They may even seem irreverent to you in some cases, but the idea is to use memorable pictures, and even a bit of humor, to cement the words into your brain.

I created slides in Google Presentation that you can view and print and use at home. You can also just pull them up on your computer and scroll through the slides. One set has the words with each picture, and the second set has just the pictures. Start with the words, and when you feel confident, move to just the picture cues until you can do it from memory with no cues.

You want to work on about 3 beatitudes at a time – don’t try and do them all at once. I highly recommend watching the Bible Buffet video above to get an idea of the process of memorizing this way.

We have now used this process for memorizing the Similes of Salt and Light. It was fast, easy, and fun. I am forever grateful to Bible Buffet for his videos that taught me to memorize scripture this way!

Here are the slides!

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