Lindsay Clandfield is an award-winning writer, teacher, teacher trainer and international speaker in the field of English language teaching. He has written more than ten coursebooks and is the main author of the new young adult course Studio (Helbling Languages). Lindsay is also the creative force behind various web projects including the popular blog Six Things, the long-running podcast The TEFL Commute, the e-publishing collective The Round and the sci-fi/adventure materials website Extreme Language Teaching. Alongside John Hughes, he is the co-author of ETpedia Materials Writing.

Photo by Nam Anh on Unsplash

A mnemonic is a sentence or short poem to help you remember something. I’ve always been on the lookout for good mnemonics to help in my teaching, and awhile ago I came across a really neat little book called “i before e – old school ways to remember stuff”. I thought I’d share six fun little mnemonics that you can use in your teaching.

1 “i before e, except after c”

This is the most famous one, used to remind us how to spell words like friend, or field. Actually, to make up for the exceptions like weight (which goes against the rule) there is a longer version I found which goes

i before e, except after c … or when sounded like a, as in neighbour and weigh.

2 Spelling Wednesday

Remember how to spell this with the following. The book I mentioned above has a whole chapter of these!

WE Do Not Eat Soup DAY

3 Days in a month

Most readers will probably be familiar with this one, Thirty days has (originally hath) September, April June and November; All the rest have thirty-one… But how does it end? I always ended with the lame “except February, which has twenty-eight”. I’ve found two other versions though, which I put below.

Excepting February alone, And that has twenty-eight days clear, with twenty-nine in each leap year.

Excepting February alone, which has but twenty-eight, in fine, till leap year gives it twenty-nine.

4 Parts of speech

The American readers of this blog might have been familiar with a song: Conjunction junction what’s your function (if you are one of those poor deprived souls who did not grow up with Schoolhouse Rock, you can see a video here) Anyway, here are a couple of others:

The preposition shows relation, as in the street, or at the station.

Conjunctions join in many ways, sentences, words or phrase and phrase.

5 Commas

I think this one is cute:

A cat has claws at the end of its paws

A comma’s a pause at the end of a clause.

6 Since

I learned this one from the great Jim Scrivener. I think it was either in his book on Classroom Management Techniques or Teaching English Grammar (I can’t remember now, but both books are great although I worry the second one is hard to find now). It was to help students remember the use of since with present perfect. You know, how students always mix up for and since? Well here it is:

We use since to say when something started.

 

 

Coming soon! Please check the Pilgrims in Teacher Training courses in 2027 at Pilgrims website