Learning rhymes is particularly useful for learning facts and dates in history. A popular one is the year America was discovered: "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue". You can make up your own rhymes for specific dates or facts, irrespective of your ability as a poet. Another popular rhyme to help spelling is: "i before e except after c".
If you have a list of words to remember, make them into a story, and make a connection between one word and another. For example, in a list of the five words "house", "tree", "guitar", "pencil" and "telephone", you could make up this story: One night, a hurricane blew a tree over, which hit a house. A man ran out of the house carrying his precious guitar but tripped on a giant pencil and ended up on the ground next to a striped telephone. He phoned emergency services. The trick is to make the story as vivid and exaggerated as possible with lots of adjectives. One word will spark the memory of the next.
This strategy works in a similar way to the story technique, but this time you are linking a word to a specific location or thing within a location. If you have a random list of five words such as "Madonna", "umbrella", "David Beckham", "dragon" and "newspaper" you could picture your study at home and make an association between Madonna and your computer, where she is singing in a concert being shown on the screen. We could then link umbrella with the door; picture a dripping umbrella drying on the door. David Beckham could be linked with the window; his goal kick has smashed it. And so on.
This technique marries rhyming with associations. For a list of 10 words, start with the numbers one to 10, and choose a rhyming word such as 1.) Sun; 2.) Shoe; 3) Tree; 4.) Saw; 5.) Hive; 6.) Sticks; 7.) Heaven; 8.) Gate; 9.) Sign; 10.) Hen. Then, take your list of 10 words, and try to link them. For example, if the first word on your list of facts is Queen Victoria of England, imagine her applying sun cream as a huge orange sun burns her face. Carry on in this way with the rest of your list. When you try to recall the first item on your list, you will say "one, sun" and the image of Queen Victoria's sunburned face should come to mind.