See my method of memorizing 196 Countries in alphabetical order, along with their Capitals in detail here. I also started using procreate to create visuals of them. I put them in pairs, since each memory palace location houses two countries. They are below and can also be found on my memorization twitter account
The Periodic Table of Elements was one of the my early memorizations (December, 2019), so my PAO was still in its infancy. For that reason, there’s not a whole lot of rhyme or reason to the connections I made between the element and my PAO. That is, I haphazardly connected the element mnemonic to my PERSON, ACTION, or OBJECT without much thought about the fact that that’s probably not the most efficient way. If I had it to do over, I would attach the element mnemonic to my OBJECT in each case. As it is now, when I try to place, say, element 37, I have to go through the added step of “searching” for either MiCK jagger, or MuGGing (posing for a picture), or MiCrophone. It is MiCrophone in this case:
Rb Rubidium 37 telling of all the sites by holding a MICROPHONE is jenny RUBIO. She sings R&B in between Rb.
For many of the elements, as in the Rubidium example above, I also attempted to incorporate a way to remember the symbol when it was not simply the first two letters of the element.
I find that I am still really efficient at recalling the elements and their atomic number, so it has stuck.
I used the linking story method to memorize the table (you can see my spreadsheet below). I learned the first 20 elements from the Memorize Academy YouTube video. After that, you had to pay for the rest of the content. While I think his videos are excellent, I didn’t want to shell out the money. I searched all over the internet for someone else’s work, but when I was unable to find any, I decided to tackle the task on my own. It did take time, but it was actually a lot of fun! I wrote it all in my trusty memorization notebook. Here is a sample from that notebook:
I’m sure I still remember these, in large part, because I created them. In any case, here is my spreadsheet for all 118 elements.
I’d love to hear from you about your own memorization of the periodic table!