One way to teach pre-med students the skeletal system is by using peer pressure in a positive way.
Each week, give the students a 15-minute test on 25 bones in a section of the body. When the test is done, collect the papers and hand them back to your students to correct and grade as homework. Each student gets another pupil's test and does not correct his own test. Direct your students to mark the answers that are wrong, and to put in the correct answers.
Continue this on a weekly basis and create a graph showing students' progress. Hang up the graph in the room before the beginning of each class for the students to see where they are in comparison to the others. The final week, give a test asking that they name all the bones.
Peer pressure will work as a positive influence in this technique. None of the students will want to receive a bad grade from one of their peers. Additionally, you will get a break from correcting all these papers, while your students receive double exposure to the tests for learning.
"Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge" is a mnemonic that has been used since your grandparents were in school to memorize a scale of musical notes. The sentence means nothing; the first letter of each word represents the letters in the scale: E, G, B, D, F. The sentence makes the information easier to memorize.
This type of memorization technique can also be used to memorize the bones in a section of the body. For example, the three bones in the finger are the distal phalanx, middle phalanx, and proximal phalanx. Suggest that students make up a sentence or a list of words that will jog their memories when being tested on this information, such as: "Disney pictures, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan." The initials DP, MP, and PP of these words will help in pulling the names of the bones out of students' memories.
Write memory sentences for each section of bones in the skeleton system as a class, or individually. Students may enjoy brainstorming at the blackboard, writing the words down. As juvenile as this may sound, you will be surprised at how much easier it will be for your students to learn all 206 bones. They can also apply this technique to other pre-med studies.
Pre-med students are usually enthusiastic about the day they will become practicing physicians, so use this to your advantage as their teacher. Instead of asking them to merely memorize the names of the bones in the skeletal system, incorporate some common bone conditions, diseases and injuries into your lessons.
In a unit about the bones of the legs, ask students to not only learn about the femur, the fibula, and the tibia, but also to research some of the diseases and injuries that are common to these bones, along with the treatment and prognosis for these conditions. This interactive classroom discussion will let your students get a jump on diagnosing and treatment, and at the same time you are making the skeletal structure an enjoyable subject to learn for tomorrow's doctors.