From the initial assessment, my mother discovered that my short term working memory was exceedingly poor. This weakness explained my difficulty with spelling requiring rote memory of the sequence of the letters.
To overcome my difficulty remembering words for spelling, my mother encouraged me to formulate memory techniques to help me with word memory. From the beginner language skill of giving a picture to letters which my mother grouped into consonants, vowels and groups (common family), my mother suggested that I remember words by creating silly, funny or hilarious stories from the letters of the words.
At the beginner stage, my mother would suggest the story line for the words given by school for the weekly spelling test. I would draw the pictures of the silly story and would sometimes change the story line to match the image for drawing and remembering the position of the letters. For example, to remember the word “FIND”, I would remember a flower for “F” and a dog for “D”. I could remember all two letter groups or family of words and hence there is no need for me to assign a picture to these groups. The picture below is the picture for remembering the word “Find”, which I remembered as “Find the Flower in a dog”.
 Word memory – beginner stage |
At the early stage, I would learn only 1 word a day, which took about 15 minutes to create the memory image. At the end of the week, I could get a correct score of 3 words out of the list of 10 words for the weekly spelling test. My mother discovered after testing me a few weeks later that after I learned a word by imagination, I would never forget how to spell it.
With daily practice to create story and images, my mother encourage me to create my own image to remember words. For example, for the word “HATCH”, I create an image of “A hen, wearing a hat, trying to hatch her eggs by saying a a a.
 Word memory – intermediate stage |
Setting a visual goal of improving my spelling test score each week, I could eventually form stories for the list of 10 words, sometimes without having to draw it out. After 6 months, when my mother discovered that I am consistently getting a perfect score of 10 out of 10 for spelling, she stopped her supervision over weekly spelling test.
After I had developed a method to remember words for my weekly spelling test, my mother continued to explore learning techniques to improve my short term working memory. In the middle of primary 2, I had extra lessons on the following different memory techniques:
Categorisation and visualization
Visual concentration exercises
Mental Movies (Linking system)
Chain memory
Mnemonics
Mind Mapping
Word Associations
Roman Room System
The number-alphabet system
Speed Reading
Although I had found a method to overcome my spelling weakness, the memory lessons provided me with more techniques which could transfer to the list of more difficult words given for the weekly spelling and dictation test.
With the practice of drawing out images to learn any new words in Primary 1, I moved on to develop the skill of visualizing silly stories without having to draw them out in Primary 2. I would need to segment the words into smaller parts and create a story to join those parts. For example, the word “Delicious” is broken into 3 parts, “Deli” “CIO” and “Us” and remember an image of my family (us) at (Deli)-france enjoying a new signature dish called “CIO”.
By the end of Primary 2, a list of 10 words and dictation, required only 3 minutes for me to visualize the image to remember new words. With this memory skill, I could remember any new words written on the board by my teacher during lesson and weekly spelling or dictation test pose no challenge to my memory weakness from primary 3.
With some background in visual memory using maps from early primary days, I went for a few lessons in primary 4 to learn the Buzan mind mapping technique. By the end of primary 6, I was equipped with a tool to remember complex information for secondary and tertiary education.
 Word memory – advance stage |