Monday, January 18, 2010

Study Tip for Grade Schoolers: Homemade flashcards

Remember flash cards?   I remember using them at school to practice memorizing my multipication tables and other math-related facts.  I also remember not liking them very much!

However, flash cards can be more than numbers.   Every child learns differently, and I've recently discovered that for a couple of my kids, they LOVE flash cards.

I started using them last year when I realized that one of my children is a particularly strong IMAGE person.  Let him watch a movie or a television show, and the information seeps painlessly into his brain.   Draw him a picture of what you're trying to teach him, and the same thing happens....easy, simple understanding.

Recently, rather than send my image learner to his bedroom with a notebook of facts to memorize, we've sat down together and reviewed his notes and his chapter.   Then I help him put the important information into picture answers.  His recall on tests is amazing!   In fact, he's not just memorizing a fact, he's understanding a concept!

Oh, and I'm not talking about buying expensive sets of pre-made notecards...I'm talking about 250 notecards for $1.00 at the Dollar Store.

Here are a couple of flash cards we made recently while he was preparing for a Social Studies test:

On one side of the card, he wrote:  Q:  Why did Columbus sail west?

Q.  What was the  Columbian Exhange?

I've now started using this flash card idea with one of my daughters who has reading comprehension problems.

And the best part we've found, is that it's easier to split up the studying. For instance, if the test is in 3 days, and they know they've written 30 cards, they break their studying down into 10 cards per day.

Do you have any study tips you use with your school-age children?   If so, please leave a comment.   We can all learn from each other!


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1 comment:

  1. Creating your own flashcards is a great idea. My son is 5 and he's learning to read. It will help him tremendously to have flashcards with the word and a pic of the word on it. That is a definite project for us to complete this weekend. Thanks.