Flash Cards

Flash cards are one of my favorite tools for helping my kids to learn. It’s easy for me, and it’s helpful to them to memorize new concepts so that they can later focus on why things are that way. By using flash cards for my kids, I’m able to help them learn more quickly, and in the long run learn new things.

Flash cards aren’t the only way you should teach your children. They are great tools, but they can also become tiresome and monotonous. Children will get sick of them if that’s all you use, and ultimately will not want to learn any longer.

Flash cards should be one of the many ways that you teach your children. Real life examples, teaching deeper concepts and ideas, and showing kids how things work are very effective mechanisms as well for helping kids to learn. Some kids will take better to one form of learning vs another.

Flash cards are useful because they will help your child to memorize things that may be difficult to explain at first, or that they understand, but shouldn’t spend a lot of time on. I’ve written about flash cards for math in the past, and they are a great tool in that subject because there are a lot of things that can be confusing.

Rote memorization of facts will help a child to move faster in subjects, and later come to better understand the full concepts around what they’re learning. For example, memorizing how to spell a word is important so your child can learn to read and start to understand better how words are put together. By memorizing words up front, they’ll know how to spell words, and they’ll begin learning how letters go together to make words. Beyond that, words start to become more difficult, and sounding things out isn’t always perfect, but because they’ve worked through memorization in the past, they’ll now be able to use those same skills.

This same concept goes for math, science, and basically any other subject that your child is learning. Memorizing new concepts will help them to learn further on the subject, and over time come to an understanding of what their learning has taught them.

Furthermore, flash cards and memorization techniques can be used as your kids get older, and as they move into college and work. Learning to use flash cards is not a one time or temporary solution for learning. It's a tool and technique that will help your child throughout their entire life to learn.

Ultimately, learning is the end goal with flash cards. If your child is not well suited to memorization, then flash cards may not work well. While most kids should be able to use them, there will be some kids that don’t take well to them. If your child struggles with using flash cards, I’d recommend talking to your doctor or educator about other ways to help your child learn.

Teaching kids is a lot of work. Using flash cards is just one of the simple ways you can make that job a little bit easier.