Mnemonic devices are little phrases that make hard-to-remember lists easy — the dragon collects the best ones here, for free, no calculator required.
Your brain remembers a silly sentence far longer than a plain list. Turning "P, E, M, D, A, S" into "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" gives each letter a place to live in a story — that's the whole trick. Below are some of the most useful ones, for school, for trivia night, and for everyday life.
Memory tricks help you hold onto information — but focus and concentration also depend on genuine nutrition. See how nutrition affects focus and learning for what real research (and one homeschool parent's experience) has to say.
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Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction — the order to solve a math expression in.
Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet — the order colors appear in a rainbow (and on a color wheel).
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — closest to farthest from the sun.
North, East, South, West — the four directions in clockwise order starting from the top of a map.
Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior — the five Great Lakes of North America, in no particular order but easy to check off.
...all the rest have thirty-one, except February alone. The oldest mnemonic on this list, and still the fastest way to check a calendar.
One "C", two "S"s — a shirt has one collar and two sleeves, and so does the word necessary.
Kilo, Hecto, Deca, (base) unit, Deci, Centi, Milli — handy for converting between metric units without a chart.
The lines (E, G, B, D, F) and the spaces spell "FACE" — everything you need to read sheet music at a glance.
For 9 × any number 1-10, the two digits of the answer always add up to 9 (e.g. 9×4=36, 3+6=9). A fast way to check your work without the calculator.