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!
