Chaos & Order: A lesson plan on memorizing

One of the most difficult things to do when teaching a particular lesson is getting the students to memorize or remember a certain set of content. This is because it involves getting them to sit down, focus and remember. That normally is a recipe for disaster as such, there needs to be something that can help act as a hook to get students to enjoy memorizing.

This may sound like a paradox, but hear me out. I teach in a culture where students are expected to memorize because of the system. Now, I'm not encouraging memorization but if you are forced to use this method, one big issue with it is that it will bore the students crazy. They either drift away in their daydreams or become very active and start becoming disruptive.

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As such, this is how I have made memorization fun.

Introduction

I introduce the story of Charlie and the Chocolate factory. Assuming that the students have not read through the story, I want them to memorize all the characters and their characteristics. As such I start introducing each character and their characteristics briefly.

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I would then proceed to dividing the class into groups of four. Each group needs to consist of a writer and three runners, each designated runner 1 to runner 3. I would also place a piece of paper in front of them.

Activity 1
The activity for this part is called "running dictation". Remember the part where the students each have a role of a runner and a writer? The runners will need to first come up to the front of the class and assemble in front of me. When I ring the bell, they would all run out of the class to pieces of paper that have been pasted on the wall outside.

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These pieces of paper contain the content that I want them to memorize, which would be the characteristics of the characters in Charlie and the chocolate factory. Each of these student will then have 1 minute to memorize the content. After a minute they will then run back to their groups and dictate what was memorized to the writer.

As this activity is ongoing, it is important that the teacher sets some form of penalty for unruly behavior, penalizing any who would disobey the rules with mark deduction. It is also important to have a bell or some sort of device where the teacher can signal the students to start or to go. This creates order amidst the chaos.

Activity 2
Activity 1 should be no loner than half an hour. By this time, your students and runners will then have to finalize what was written down on the piece of paper, which should be the characteristics of the characters in Charlie and the chocolate factory. The teacher can then take each paper, take a photo using a smartphone and upload the students' work to the computer. This is for the purpose of projecting the work onto the whiteboard for analysis.

The teacher can then compare each group's work , awarding marks to any group based on the accuracy of their work.

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Conclusion
The teacher can then end the lesson with an activity sheet on the content taught earlier. However, it should be noted that based on my experience with running dictation lessons, the students tend to be able to remember quite a bit. This is because it is both fun and competitive, especially if there is a prize involved.

Furthermore, I have never had a class where the students were not able to memorize at least 40% of the content. That being said, do take note that it can be very chaotic. However, it is a form of chaos that is fun and nothing beats the satisfaction of having made something boring like memorization, fun.

I hope this was helpful. If you are like me teaching in classes where you need to get students to memorize a lot of content in class, do give 'running dictation' a go! Let me know if you need any clarifications in the comments below.