The Privileged Poor, once the blog site of a now defunct clothing store, is now the site of the Alive Juice Bar tutoring service.   We’ll be posting daily lesson plans to help students get through indefinite school closures.

Make your own acronym

Memory is a muscle that anyone can develop. Here’s a trick to memorize the known planets in our solar system, acronyms! First, the planets, from closest to the sun to the farthest.

• Mercury
• Venus
• Earth
• Mars
• Jupiter
• Saturn
• Uranus
• Neptune
• Pluto (not sure if it’s still considered a planet, can skip this one)

Now make a sentence using the first letter of each planet, starting in sequence from Mercury to Neptune.  Example:

My Very Edgy Mom Just Slapped Uncle Nathan

Do at least one.  And I don’t want you to memorize popular acronyms for the planets, I want you to make one because the process of making one is a creativity drill. And since you made the acronym, you’re more likely to remember it.

Use your acronym to help you memorize the images of each planet. You’ll need to do this to do the next exercise.

Memorizing Pi

One trick to memorizing numbers is to break it up into groups and associate each group with an image.

3.1415926535 8979323846

Break it this way:

3.14 — Mercury
159 — Venus
265  — Earth
358 — Mars
979 –Jupiter
323 –Saturn
846 — Uranus
264 — Neptune

Now try memorizing it. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can memorize it when you associate numbers with images, when you arrange the numbers this way.