Are Flashcards Actually Useful?
They're an age-old teaching tool, so you might be asking: are flashcards still valuable in the elementary classroom? Well, yes! The education research indicates flashcards are every bit as valuable for improving students' metacognition today as they were decades ago when you were sitting behind the student desk. Using flashcards in the classroom — or at home — allows students to practice their active recall and confidence-based repetition.How to Use Flashcards
Whether you're printing out flashcards for students to use when they're learning sight words, new vocabulary words, place value, or any of the hundreds of thousands of concepts elementary students work through, flashcards can be used in a variety of ways to make learning fun. For example, many popular children's games can be adapted so they can be played with flashcards to help boost students' recall of learned concepts. Here are a few tried and true ways to use flashcards our teacher team swears by!- Play a curriculum-based version of the game Memory with flashcards. All the cards are turned upside down, and cards are flipped over two at a time to find matches.
- Play flashcard charades in small groups. Students pick from a pile of cards and act out what they see on the card for their peers to guess.
- Play Who Am I? In this group game, students make a headband out of construction paper that's been stapled to form a wring then staple or tape a flashcard to the center. Students then ask yes or no questions of their classmates in order to guess what is on the flashcard.
- Pronunciation Challenge. Teaching a foreign language this school year? Elementary schoolers can have fun practicing their pronunciation by pulling flashcards from a pile and sounding out the words!
