Flash Players

When I first started out as a homeschooling mommy, I had a lot of romantic ideas about what it would be like to teach my own daughters. Some came true, others didn't.

I imagined rainy afternoons of cozy read-aloud sessions. Check.

I hoped for unending trips to explore new beaches and pick ripe berries and wander through the zoo till we no longer needed to look at the map to find our way around. Check, check and check.

I said EXPLORE new beaches. Not EAT them.

I dreamed of cheerful sessions of memorizing math facts by using my old favorites, the flash cards. Screeeeeeeeeeeech. BAM.

{That is the sound of my dream skidding off the road of reality and crashing into a ditch.}

My children did not immediately take to the notion of flash cards. They found them to be dull, repetitive, and uninspiring. 

And when I thought about it, I had to admit that flash cards did not fit with my overall philosophies for education either. I'm all about active, multi-sensory, student-led learning. I wanted my daughters to become creative, critical thinkers who understood big-picture context and saw the forest rather than the trees. 

Flash cards represent the trees. Not the forest.

So I ditched the flash cards and took my kids to the planetarium instead. And we all were happy again.

Fast forward several years, and flash cards entered our lives for round two. This time, my friend and future teaching partner, Heidi, was leading a United States geography class. I loved her vision for learning - she had the kids cooking regional recipes and playing games to reinforce map work and having great conversations about what it would be like to go mining for diamonds in Arkansas, and stuff like that. 

In order to put a bit of structure to those creative explorations, Heidi decided to have the kids memorize the names and capitals of the fifty states. That made perfect sense to me.

As a tool to accomplish that memorization, Heidi brought out a set of flash cards. Whoa. I bit my lip and prepared for a mutiny.

One hundred tiny scraps of cardstock; one for each of the fifty states and their fifty capitals. Many ways to play with them, but our favorite is to simply take turns drawing one at random, and naming its partner - if you draw a state, name its capital city; if you draw the capital, name the corresponding state. 

But guess what. Heidi knew how to make flash cards fun. She used them in different ways - sometimes we played as a group and competed against each other, sometimes the kids worked as partners, sometimes she posed individual challenges. The students were not sitting idly in chairs as she slowly revealed each card to them; they were up and moving and laughing and playing and having fun. Also, Heidi had a special sensitivity for mistakes; she acknowledged mistakes but affirmed the effort. I was impressed.

Heidi knows how to make flash cards fun. She's magical like that.

And guess what else. The students loved those flash cards. And they learned all those states and capitals in record time. 

Now when our students eat a slice of pumpkin cheesecake that they baked from scratch all by themselves, they can also tell you that the state of Delaware has a 'punkin chunkin' contest every fall, where Delawarians compete to hurl orange gourds through the sky. And they can spell 'Delaware' and tell you that its capital is Dover. Not too shabby, right?

Flashcards aren't too shabby either. Heidi and I went on to teach together for many years, and our classes were all designed to include these essential ingredients - freewheeling, hands-on big-picture exploration and a flash card-driven set of memorized facts to provide structure to those experiences

And our students have come to LOVE flashcards. 

Well, they might not want to admit that. Love is a mighty strong word. But I can tell you that's it's true.

Here are some stories that prove it.

For our class on the United States presidents, Heidi found this set of official portraits of each of the 43 presidents to date. When Obama was elected as the 44th, we made a homemade card to include him.

Each time our class met, we would review the presidents learned so far by lining up the cards on the railing of our classroom whiteboard. One at a time, I would turn over each card, and we would tell each other stories about that president and then give him his appropriate place in the row. Each week, we added a new president and by the end of the year, our presidential parade spanned the whole front of the classroom.

So many funny stories and great memories came from these cards. The students had an inside joke about Andrew Jackson's hairline (he's the one in the top right, with the red thingy around his shoulders). Something about how it looked like a dress on top of his head. I still don't understand that one, but no matter. They do.

Also, we found John Adam's nickname of 'Butterball' to be an incredibly apt description of his face (top card in the upper left). During the year, the students kept a funny little sketch of his chubby round noggin on my whiteboard at all times; during a recent visit back to my classroom, one of those students redrew the picture, for old times' sake. John Adam's face is on my board at this moment, even though the class ended years ago. 

Flash cards have a way of sticking with you.

We made a second set of flash cards to memorize the names of the presidents, and to practice putting them in order by name rather than face. Each student made their own set of cards; I wish I could show you all the creativity and original thinking that they put into their work.  This is my set.

I made this set so you can just put the names in order, or you can match them to the numbered cards and build the proper sequence that way. We broke the whole group of presidents down into seven subgroups, and gave each group a color to aid in memorization. Little tricks like that make an overwhelming amount of information more manageable.

The next year, we studied the Middle East. Remembering our good fun with the presidents' faces, we decided to make our own set of flash cards to show the top ten Middle East leaders of all time. Oh my gosh, the great times we had, looking at those colorful men and women, discussing their achievements and personal stories, arranging them this way and that on the white board railing to illustrate different relationships and tensions within the region. 

For the final exam, I held up each card, one at a time, and instructed the students to write anything and everything they had learned about that individual. After five minutes, as I changed to the next face, they all groaned and complained because they still had more that they wanted to write. This is a good problem for a student to have. This is a good problem for a teacher to have. 

{I still have those homemade flash cards in my classroom. I'll take a picture later and post it here. Too good to be left out.}

We also memorized country names, capitals and flags. As usual, our students were mostly busy eating hummus, making models of Libya's Great Manmade River, and adorning each other with henna tattoos. Memorizing these cold, hard facts was not seen as their main task of learning but as an interesting part of the overall project. As it should be.

I color-coded the backs of these cards - red cards are flags, blue are capital cities, yellow cards show the country names. The colors add another dimension for playing with the flashcards in different ways. 

In a surprising twist, I've also found flash cards to be a great tool in art classes. Years ago, one of my families gave me a great set of art flash cards. Of course, marketers know better that to pin the great masterpieces of western art with the label of 'flash cards'. Instead they put this collection in a box with a great graphic design and called it The Art Box. 

Clever. Beautiful. Useful. But let's face it, they are flash cards.

My art students of all ages have had a ton of fun with these. When studying a specific topic, such as color, line or space, we have sorted through the images to find pieces to illustrate each concept. We've arranged the images according to date, to see how art has progressed. In some classes, we have memorized key facts such as title and artist's name; in other classes, we have used them to inspire our own work.

It's one thing for me to sit here and gush about the great fun my students have had with flash cards. But I'll admit that if I had not seen it with my own eyes, I might be a tad skeptical.

Would it help if I told you that my youngest recently suggested that she should probably memorize the names and capitals of Europe...and asked me to help her make a set of flash cards to accomplish that impressive feat?

Yep, it's true. My daughters have become flash players too. Come back tomorrow and I'll show you the proof.