Memorize It

Remind your students that accuracy is a vital part of recitation. Share these memorization strategies with them:

• Rewrite your poem by hand several times. Each time, try to write more and more of it from memory.
• Read your poem aloud before going to sleep at night and repeat it when you wake up.
• Carry around a copy of your poem in your pocket or bag. You'll find many opportunities throughout the day to reread or recite it.
• Practise your poem by reciting it to family and friends.

Here are some more tips:

• Be strategic. Pick a poem with a pattern — metre and rhyme are much easier to learn by heart than free verse.
• Be old school. Copy the poem out a couple of times — on actual paper.
• Be hermetic. Turn off your cell phone and close your laptop screen — you need quiet.
• Be relentless. Say the poem over and over — and over and over.
• Be patient. Take it one line at a time, and don’t get frustrated if you forget lines.
• Be weird. Don’t be afraid to practice on family, friends, mirrors, and walls.
• Beware! Memorizing poems is habit-forming — you’ll want to learn more.

—Jason Guriel, Reader’s Digest