The ABC Circle (Version 3.5)
By Bill Lauritzen
This symmetrical ABC Circle incorporates principles of geometry,
physics (color), psychology (chunking, mapping), and non-linear
(holistic) thinking.
Psychologists have long known that we should "chunk"
information in order to remember it easily. Thus, our phone number is
chunked into a 3-3-4 pattern (example: 333-444-6666), our social security number is chunked into
a 3-2-3 pattern (222-44-5555), etc. The ABC Circle has the easy-to-remember pattern: 444-22-444
Unfortunately, the traditional "alphabet song," by which most students learn the alphabet, has the following pattern: 4345-33-22. This lacks lacks the symmetry and pattern of the ABC Circle. I want to have a contest to compose a song.
Also having a "visual map" of information helps to anchor and
organize the information in the student's neural system.
Placing all the letters in a circle allows a student to see all of them
at
one time. A student can see that any letter can connect with any other
letter. If the letters are in a straight line such as usually is used in
a school (ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQUSTUVWXYZ) the student has to
"mentally" rearrange
the letters in order to link them together into a word. In other
words, in the ABC Circle the various permutations are more evident. So
the ABC Circle might promote more creative, holistic thinking.
Most of the universe uses circular or spherical shapes. Gravity pulls spherically inward, while radiation flows spherically outward. Our eyeballs, our brains, the Earth, the moon, the sun, etc., are mostly spherical and they circle around the Earth, or sun, or the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, etc.