Talia Says: Sam Really Acts Creatively

There are many ways a person can read, review, and study their notes. Listening in class and taking minimum notes, highlighting key points during a lecture, or my personal favorite, the Sam Really Acts Creatively strategy. This strategy emphasizes reading, and in my opinion, an easy way of memorization. I am very confident that this strategy can be successful for anyone as much as it is for me, and this is how I complete it to perfection.

The first step of this strategy is to survey the chapter and create questions, and then search for answers. Clearly write these questions and answers on a sheet of paper to establish a reading purpose. For those topics that may be hard to understand, a graphic organizer fits into play.

As I have blogged about before, for people who are kinesthetic learners like me, I would recommend using the Tree Diagrams. This graphic organizer lays out point-by-point and in great detail of the topic that is confusing. For example, I constantly blog about my HPM 314 class because it is the class I have the most notes and the most information to memorize of my classes. In this class, we are currently learning about labor unions, and I am having trouble understanding the topic of “why union-free matters”. Therefore, I created a tree diagram, which illustrated it to my better understanding. I broke down the reasoning’s into more clear and detailed explanations that I can understand and comprehend better so that I will do well on the test. Since this is such a large topic that is discussed in lecture, I know I must understand it in order to do well.

In addition, my advertising course (ADV 206) is a course that does not have a lot of topics but rather information. Advertising has been a practice in the human workforce and business world for a very long time, and continues to grow. Technology has also played a huge part in the creation of modern advertising which leads to a lot of information and history that we must memorize for exams. In this class we are currently learning about the changing landscape in modern media. As one can assume, there is a lot of information and for me it is very hard to keep track and memorize it all.

Rather than focusing on lecture, my teacher bases his quizzes and tests off of the textbook. Therefore, reading is very important and since I enjoyed the Sam Really Acts Creatively strategy in HPM 314, I decided to use it again for ADV 206. To begin, I read chapter 6 and created test questions. I then proceeded to make a graphic organizer for the topic “How Newspaper Ads are Sold”, however this time I used a concept map because there were a lot of details.

Once a graphic organizer is complete, I am finally allowed to use flash cards. Although I have been searching for other ways that I enjoy to study, I keep finding myself returning to flash cards. For a reason unknown, it is my comfort zone. I am trying to break out of this and explore new options.

Sam Really Acts Creatively is an excellent strategy which incorporates my comfort zone as well as combining other strategies into the mix. For those of you who are reading this and feel the same way, I highly recommend you to try the Sam Really Acts Creatively strategy and I can guarantee you will enjoy it as much as I did.

I hope everyone enjoys his or her spring break and you’ll hear from “Talia Say’s” when we return!