Skills Guide Content
Goal: Strategies to organize information
The brain loves novelty: ice cream, swings, laughter, flashing lights. Use colors, highlighting, bolding, capitalizations, different handwriting sizes to create novelty.
When your student is reading their notes and comes across something that is visually different, it will help lock it into their memory for easier recall during tests and projects.
Activity from Planner
How information is organized and presented profoundly affects our brain’s ability to process that information.
It can affect how quickly we can understand the information or how well we can remember it!
How many words start with “I” in the first sentence? What about the second? See the difference?
Note taking tricks:
- Use color and highlight
- Underline or star ⋆
- Bold words by tracing over them
- Write in ALL CAPS
Extended Activity
How information is organized and presented profoundly affects our brain’s ability to process that information. It can affect how quickly we can understand the information or how well we can remember it! Don’t believe us? We’ll show you! Read the following paragraphs and answer the questions that follow.
Samuel’s cousins don’t all live in the same city, but he will see them all this summer! He is going with his cousin Gus to Florida and will see Carson and Will there. These four cousins haven’t been all in the same place since they were in kindergarten! When he returns from Florida, his aunt is bringing his baby cousin, Logan, and her two siblings, Evie and Anna, for a visit.
How many cousins does Samuel have? How many are girls? How many are boys?
Tim has planted a garden with Esther’s help. She loves eating fresh vegetables and was sure to plant carrots, kale, and sweet red peppers. Tim enjoys fruit, so he put strawberries next to the kale and blackberries along the fence. Their parents always make homemade pickles, so they couldn’t leave out the cucumbers!
How many different kinds of plants are in the garden? How many fruits? How many vegetables?
Which questions were easier to answer? Did you have to go back and re-read to find your answers? Which set were you able to complete faster? If we ask you these same questions again tomorrow, what will you remember?
We didn’t leave you room to write here because we know the answers already, and now you do too. You can use these same tricks to organize your notes and thoughts. You can bold letters by writing over a word more than once or use highlighters in different colors to go back and organize things you already wrote down.
Even if there isn’t a sense of organization to your colors, color variations can still help you skim and recall information. You might remember that you wrote down your chemistry notes on the periodic table in purple that day and later be able to quickly flip through your notebook to find the right place to study from.
We made this planner black and white ON PURPOSE!! You can use color your way to remember and review anything you put in it!
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