Vocabulary Notebooks and a Tip for Learning the Order of Hiragana

In a recent post I wrote about my experimentation with vocabulary notebooks in two of my classes. Through the notebooks, I encourage learners to use mnemonic techniques (a technique to help you remember something) to help them remember difficult words, to write derivations of new words(for examlpe derivations of register are registration, preregister etc..) and write collocations or sentences for new words.
This week I collected 40 vocabulary notebooks but realized that I was kidding myself if I thought that I could actually go over each notebook in detail this week. However, I did learn through a quick perusal of the notebooks that the learners were not using mnemonic techniques and had a difficult time understanding the concept of derivations. I have decided to reintroduce the technique of mnemonics and give learners the opportunity to think of some keywords to remember words by working in pairs. I will also introduce some common prefixes and suffixes in class.
By the way, here is a mnemonic technique for remembering the order of the phonetic characters in the Japanese Hiragana alphabet. To remember the order, just memorize the English sentence below.
あ a
か killer
さ　said
た to
な　Nancy
は hey
ま man
や you
ら　rap
わ well