Flashcards!

Flashcards are a very useful tool when teaching new vocabulary to or young students is about, or maybe if you need your students to memorize some math formulas, etc.

They are easy to carry, very attractive(if you do it correctly) and toddlers, kids, and children love them. Also flash cards are a really good tool for our visual learners because of its bright colors and images.

These cards are very simple, but depending on our students' level we have to take into account some special characteristics. It is common that if we are working with kids or children, we are going to use images, colors, big and colorful letters or words. But, if our students are in a junior level or we work with adults, our flashcards are not going to be the same that we would use with kids and children; maybe we decide to just write on the card a simple word, a sentence or a formula. 

What is a flashcard?

A flashcard is a type of card used to learn easier by memorizing or asociating a word with an image. Flashcards are made of cardboard, plastic, paper, etc. They contain a word (the concept we are trying to learn or memorize) and an image. But, also we can find flashcards which contain only a word, those are called word cards or word flashcards.

"Flashcards is ELT jargon for pictures (or diagrams, words, etc,) that you can show to students[...] They are also useful for handing out as part of various activities. They are a very useful teaching aid, especially in your earlier years of teaching". - Scrivener(1994)

When do we use flashcards?

We can use our flashcards as a warm-up, as presentation, or even at the end of the class if we use them as a game or as practice. We can even ask students to create their own set to play at home with their siblings or parents so they will be learning out of the classroom. 

How do we make our flashcards?

If you do not want to make them by yourself, you can buy them. If you do not want to spend a lot of money by buying a set of flashcards you can create them easily. You can make them of any resistant material you want, but you need to know that flashcards should be large enough so the students who ar sitting in the back are able to see them. You can use pictures from magazines, newspaper, printed from internet of you can use your own drawings. DO NOT forget they have to be all of the same size, colorful and very attractive. Or you can tell to your students to create a different set(one per student), so the classroom will be already prepared to work with flashcards when they learn about animals, food, verbs, sports, etc.

You only need to give them the instructions and give them an example.

These are some examples of a set that I created. The flascards contain the verb in simple present above the image, and the same verb in simple past under the picture. The letter size is big enough so my students can read it well. Also the images are large and coloful.

Example of an activity using Flashcards

Memory game:

Level: 7-8 years old    2nd grade  Elementary School            Topic: Sports

Teacher places flashcards on the floor facing down. Half of the flashcards contain objects that students associate with a sport (e.g googles, swimming suit=swimming) and the other half contains only the name of the sport(e.g. SWIMMING).

Students sitting around the flashcards take a pair by turns. Students will be learning the name of sports by associating the objects with the word. Finally, the player with more pairs will be the winner of the game.

Bibliography:

 Scrivener, J. (1994). Toolkit 3: Tools, techniques, activities. In Learning teaching: A guidebook for English language teachers (2nd Edition ed., p. 430). Oxford: Heinemann (Oxford).