📖 How to memorise a lesson (and remember it for the test)

The test is on Thursday. The lesson is just twelve lines long. Your child reads it for the fifth time, slumped over the table, and assures you, “It’s fine, I know it.” On Thursday evening, they come home with a so-so mark and that classic phrase every parent dreads: “But I knew it yesterday!”

They’re not lying, and they don’t have a “bad memory”. What they’re missing is simply a method for learning a lesson. Memorising isn’t a gift, it’s a process: understand, break it down, recite with the book closed, get quizzed, review the next day. Fifteen minutes the first evening, two minutes on the following days. Here’s how to do it, from CP to CM2, for any subject.

Why “I knew it last night” isn’t a lie

At the end of the 19th century, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus measured how quickly we forget what we’ve just learned—on himself. His famous result, known as the forgetting curve, is striking: we forget very quickly in the first few hours, then the decline slows down. So a lesson crammed in the night before will last… until the next morning, sometimes less.

Two strategies, though, are well proven and easy to use at home:

• Test yourself instead of rereading. Research by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, published in 2006 in Psychological Science, showed that trying to recall a text from memory helps you remember it much better than simply rereading it, even if you spend the same amount of time.
• Space it out. Two five-minute sessions over one or two days are better than ten minutes all at once the night before. It’s the return to the lesson that makes it stick, not the length of the session.

In short: it’s not how many times your child reads the lesson that matters, but how many times they try to say it all with the book closed.

The 5-step method for memorising a lesson

This approach works for history, science, grammar—any subject. Allow about fifteen minutes the first evening.

Notice what's missing from this table: silent rereading, highlighting, and copying out neatly. These are children's favourite activities because they're quiet, look nice, and feel safe. But they don't actually test anything.

Breaking up the lesson: the trick that changes everything

A twelve-line lesson presented as a block is like a wall for an eight-year-old. Split into four chunks of three lines, it becomes four small, manageable pieces. Our short-term memory can only hold a few things at once—so it's better to give it less, but make sure it's meaningful.

Here's an example with a science lesson on the water cycle. Instead of one paragraph, use four labels: l'évaporation, la condensation, les précipitations, le ruissellement. The child learns label 1 and repeats it. Then 1 and 2. Then 1, 2, and 3. In the end, they're not reciting twelve lines—they're running through four words, each pulling its own sentence along.

This 'snowball' method has a side effect to be aware of: the first chunk gets repeated every round, the last only once. So, start from a different point every other evening, otherwise the end of the lesson will always be the weakest part.

For a long lesson (a history chapter, a geography topic with several parts), the breakdown can become a drawing: the main theme in the centre, a branch for each part, a keyword per branch. That's the whole idea behind the mind map for learning, which turns a page of text into a picture you can redraw from memory.

The parent-quizzer: five rules to make the most of five minutes

This is the most useful moment of the evening—and the one that can go off the rails fastest. Five rules are enough to keep it effective and bearable.

1. Count to five before giving a hint. Silence feels awkward for you, not for their memory: it's in those seconds that they're searching, and searching helps the lesson stick. If you prompt too soon, you take away that effort.
2. Ask the questions out of order. Many children have only memorised the sequence: they know line 4 only after reciting line 3. In the test, the question about line 4 will come on its own.
3. Favour open questions. 'Tell me what happens when water vapour rises into the sky' makes them explain; 'water turns into...?' just needs a word to fill the gap.
4. Don't correct word for word. Except in special cases (see below), a lesson repeated in their own words is a lesson understood. Go over the precise vocabulary, but let the phrasing go.
5. Always finish with a question they know. We mostly remember the ending—so let it be a success. If refusal is constant, the problem isn't the lesson: we cover this in getting a reluctant child to revise.

Word for word or in their own words? What needs to be exact

Not everything needs to be learned word for word, and insisting otherwise wears everyone out. The division is simple.

• Word for word required: a poem, a times table, a verb conjugation, vocabulary for a foreign language, a date, or a definition the teacher wants exactly as given.
• In their own words: a history, science, or geography lesson, or a grammar rule explained. With one exception: keywords (the names of parts, technical terms) must be exact.

For anything that must be word perfect, a mnemonic saves precious time. That's the idea behind The Big Book of Memory Tricks: a little phrase or picture instead of three lines to memorise. And for a text to recite, the step-by-step method is explained in our article on how to learn a poem quickly.

Adapting the method to each subject

The five steps stay the same. What changes is the form of the 'closed-book quiz'. As for the best way to learn (seeing, saying, doing), it depends more on the lesson than the child: we debunk this myth in visual or auditory memory.

History

Tell the lesson as a story, in order, with its characters. Dates stick better on a hand-drawn timeline than in a list: you'll find our tips in remembering history dates.

Science and geography

The best test is drawing from memory. The child redraws the water cycle or the map studied on a blank sheet, then compares it with their book. Whatever's missing from their drawing is what still needs work.

Grammar and conjugation

Learn the rule and a model example, then check with a new example. For the present tense of être, the child recites « je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont », then uses it in a sentence they make up. Reciting the rule without knowing how to use it is no help in a test.

English and vocabulary

Little cards: the French word on one side, the English on the other. Pick a card, say the answer, turn it over. Cards answered correctly three nights in a row leave the pile.

How to learn a lesson quickly when there's only one evening left

It's 7:30 pm, the test is tomorrow, and no one thought to start three days ago. It happens in every family. Here's the emergency plan—twenty minutes, stopwatch ready:

1. 3 min: they read the lesson out loud and tell you what it's about. Don't skip this step, even in a rush: what you haven't understood takes much longer to remember.
2. 2 min: together, you break the lesson into 3 or 4 chunks, one keyword per chunk.
3. 8 min: snowball method, closed book, chunk by chunk.
4. 4 min: quiz out of order. Write down the two tricky points on a piece of paper, and nothing else.
5. 3 min, next morning: the two points noted the night before, plus a full recitation. At breakfast, not in the car just before school: there needs to be time to fix any forgotten bits.

And above all, stop at a sensible time. A tired child repeating their lesson late at night won't remember much: they'll just get anxious. The morning review will make up for far more than the extra fifteen minutes squeezed in the night before.

A revision method that works all week long

When the lesson is set several days in advance, spread the work out instead of cramming the night before. Here's a simple schedule for a test announced a week ahead:

• The day the lesson is taught: steps 1 to 4, about fifteen minutes.
• The next day: two minutes reciting with the notebook closed.
• Two or three days later: questions in random order, five minutes.
• The night before the test: a full recitation, then off to bed.
• The morning of the test: three questions, no more.

If your evenings are already busy, keep these review sessions very short: short, regular sessions are much better than one long, exhausting one. And for lessons that come up every year (tables, homophones, agreements, conjugation rules), a well-chosen memory trick saves having to relearn everything for each test. That’s exactly what The Big Book of Memory Tricks offers: tried-and-tested tips, organised by subject from CP to CM2, ready to open on the kitchen table that very evening, so your child has a handy hook to help break down their lesson.

The method for learning a lesson, in summary

A good way to learn a lesson fits in one sentence: understand, break it down, recite with the notebook closed, get quizzed in random order, review the next day. The rest (endless rereading, highlighters, copying notes three times) mostly just feels like work.

To try this out on a short exercise this weekend, download our free printable workbook: one page, fifteen minutes, and notebook closed at the end.