• Question: What is the easy way ti remeber the Periodic Table?

    Asked by 235689jack to Amy, Karen, Sarah, Vijay, Will on 15 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Karen Reed

      Karen Reed answered on 15 Jun 2012:

      Is there one???

      I used to chant it out – can only get as far as oxygen!

      Sorry – can’t help – but I bet Will will know 🙂

    • Photo: Amy Birch

      Amy Birch answered on 15 Jun 2012:

      I have no idea! I bet Will has some handy tips.
      I just use Google 🙂

    • Photo: Will Reynolds

      Will Reynolds answered on 15 Jun 2012:

      Hi Jack. Thats a tricky one. At school you should only need to know the first 20 and after that I just look it up anyway! I used to make a tune in my head and make up words with the chemical symbols to remember them like: H, HeLiBe, BCNOFNe, NaMgAl, SiPS, ClArK, Ca. All of them except sodium and pottasium start with the same letters as their symbols so if you can remeber the symbols you can work out the elements.

      Here is a really cheesy song that every chemist has heard at some point in their career and you might have heard already, but it doesnt put them in order

      And heres a new one I only found today, which has other useful stuff in it:

      The first 9 are even in a song by a guy called Scroobius Pip which might help if you can remember it:

    • Photo: Sarah Martin

      Sarah Martin answered on 17 Jun 2012:

      I would personally go for this option!
      🙂

      OK, it’s cheating, but very useful in many ways.

Comments

  • Photo: Karen

    Karen commented on :

    See I said Will would have an answer 🙂
    But it jogged my memorry – there are proven ways to increase your recall memmory – like learning through association. So you’d picture a story line with each of the things in it in order assoicated with something else – like a walk to school, leaving home with a hydrogen balloon, then talking in a squeeky voice from helium, giving your friend a lithium tablet for their schizophrenia, and they were wearing a hat with BA on it (for Barilium) etc. The BBC program bang goes the theory demonstrated this technique to learn all the periodic table check out the results
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00k7prj
    (hope that link works)