Back in my high school drama class, I remember being assigned a several page selection from Robert Fulgum’s “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”. It was to be memorized and shared in front of the class and later would be used for speech competitions. I was horrified and overwhelmed. No way could I memorize that many words. I expressed as much to the teacher and she suggested that I shouldn’t worry about the memorization. “When you practice just read it,” she said. So I faithfully practiced reading it every day, a couple of times a day for about a month and somewhere in there I was surprised and delighted to realize that I knew it. Word for word with no mistakes: I knew it.
The big kids are working on memorizing Psalm 23 right now and I could tell when I introduced the assignment that Sister was horrified and overwhelmed and my teacher’s advice came back to me. “Don’t worry,” I told Sister. “You don’t have to memorize it. Just read it, out loud, once a day, everyday. That will be good enough.” She was visibly relieved that I changed the assignment. I am glad to know that she will memorize it anyway but without the stress.
With Sister taken care of, I turned my attention to Brother. How to you have an emerging reader work through such a long text, with such big words as “righteousness” and “shadow” everyday without frustrating him? How do you make it manageable and fun? What if you made a little book with illustrations to help remember the words. What if instead you put the memory verses on a ring? Then you’d have a MemoRing (I’m a sucker for puns.) Here’s what it looks like.
(all images taken from MS Word clip art or public domain image searches)
Brother has no problem flipping through the pages and saying the whole chapter unassisted. I will definitely be making more of these in the future.
