Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally

I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. One of the things that we learned in school was the menmonic (say “new monic”) HOMES.

HOMES stood for the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior.

Mnemonic devices can be valuable to help students remember important information. That’s especially true for students who have difficulty recalling things, like those with ADHD.

For instance, the title of this post, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” is a mnemonic device for math and it’s order of operations. An equation containing several operations must be solved in the following order:

Parentheses come first followed by
Exponents then
Multiplication
Division
Addition and
Ssubtraction.

There are some common mnemonics out there – see this page for some – but you can also make up your own.

If you have a group of things that go together and that you need to remember, you can make your own mnemonic to help you remember.

Here’s one I just made up to remember the Midwestern states: 3 M’s, 3 I’s, 2 N’s and woks.
Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Ohio, Kansas and South Dakota.

And if you would like to see more, check out this page.