But even so, a bit of rote memorization can help students. It allows them to show mastery of a set of knowledge, and I can't think of a student who doesn't enjoy the feeling of secure knowledge on test day.
What not to do. It is probably not best to learn them the way I did in high school: as bare endings. We would chant "a, ae, ae, am, a, ae, arum, is, as, is". I clearly remember that. Or "O, S, T, M-U-S, T-I-S, N-T" as if it were a high-school cheer. The teacher was a fun woman and made it pretty painless, but she forgot to tell us that endings never occur on their own.
Here's something better. You should always practice endings with their word, at the very least. So instead of the first chant above, you can recite "ala, alae, alae, alam, ala, alae, alarum, alis, alas, alis" so you can learn two things at once: first declension endings and the word for wing. While this isn't the best way at to learn Latin, it does work. A 20-minute walk to school each day gave me plenty of opportunity to recite words to myself this way. There is a reason I know my case endings cold and always have.
Better yet. This is no doubt the trickiest. You'll have to find or make up sentences that feature the word in context. "Ala est pulchra. Alae forma habet aedificium. Alae pennas dedit Deus. Alam habet aedificium. In ala sunt pennae…" See how I've given each form of ala its own context? What's useful here is that students also learn how the cases work, which is a whole 'nuther problem. What's tricky is that you've got to work much harder to come up with these sentences. (You could also arrange these so that they drill one particular case instead of the one declension shown here.)
No matter how you do it, take time for it every day. Latin is a lot like math in that it needs a bit of daily attention rather than a heap of infrequent attention.
This work by Peter Sipes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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