An idea... By LindaR

My fourth grade students came up with a variety of ways to remember, so I didn't want to confuse them with MY way of remembering (or someone else's!). I still had some who got confused, so I showed them this trick:

Think of X as a person walking. I made an X on the overhead, put shoes on it, and a head. We had a lot of fun with that (which made them even more involved). I showed them that we always need to walk to the ladder before we start climbing it (show with fingers, X sticks, etc).

I didn't want to emphasize much with the Y except that it's what comes next. Some of the kids liked to think of the Y as holding its arms up to show upward movement, but then I'd have those kids that'd say, "HUH??? I'm confused!"

I wanted to make sure they got the X since it's the first one to get going in the right direction

Also, whenever they wrote the coordinates, I had them label X and Y under the lines where they placed the actual coordinate number.

Be sure to give your student plenty of fun coordinate activities to reinforce the concept. There's no better way of "learning" than by doing.