Carol Read: Ideas for using flashcards

Flash cards are a simple, useful and flexible resource for teaching vocabulary. They are a great way to present, practise and recycle vocabulary. As a future teacher, I would like to show you that there are lots of ways to use flashcards in the Young Learner classroom.

To start, I leave you the following video in which, Carol Read, explains 10 different activities to teach English in primary. I recommend you to see it because she explains how to use the flashcards in a very detailed way.  

The 10 activities she proposes are the following: 

1. Flash 
2. Slowly, slowly
3. What´s missing
4. Magic eyes
5. Lip reading 
6. Flashcard riddles 
7. Flashcard groups 
8. Hands on head 
9. Flashcard chain 
10. Kim´s game

I will not explain them because I think they are very well explained in the video. However, I am going to talk about which ones I find more suitable to use in infant education and my opinion about the flashcards as teaching-learning resource.

 ·       Flashcard in Infant education:

As I said before, the activities we have seen are for elementary school children; I mean, they are suitable for use in primary. Despite that, I would like to talk about some of them because I think we could do them in infant education.

Of the above activities, I would use “Flash” and “Slowly, slowly” activities because, in my opinion, when we use flashcards to introduce vocabulary in the classroom, we have to create some suspense or mystery about the cards. This will help students be more invested and more likely to remember the words.  Students are more receptive to learning when they are curious.

I also think “Flashcard riddles” is a good activity for very young children. It is a guessing game in which the child relates his previous knowledge (colours, numbers…) with the new vocabulary. This is interesting because they learn to relate all the vocabulary learned.

 ·       Flashcards as teaching-learning resource:

From my point of view, flashcards are an essential tool because they make a real impact on visual learners. As Gardner says, there are some types of intelligence. One of them is visual. In this way, flashcards help learners to have a very clear understanding of the word or concept. So, in this sense, flashcards help teachers to draw the visual learners' attention.

Even so, as teachers, we have to take into account that not all children learn in the same way. For that reason, in addition to flashcards, we must do other types of activities to teach vocabulary.  

The Pygmalion Effect and the Power of Positive Expectations

According to what The Pygmalion Effect tell us, the expectations a teacher has about his students, directly influence their academic performance. This can be seen perfectly in this video.

An exam is taken at a school. Then they put the names of all the students inside a hat and they take out several, randomly.  Teachers are told that these children are the smartest or that they have the best results.

In one hand, we can see that children to whom teachers pay more attention develop more skills and learn much more than the rest. This is because teachers create a warmer climate with these students and give them more input than to the rest of their classmates. I mean, they are treated in a closer way. That is, the “favourite” students are the ones who learn the most.

On the other hand, these prejudices cause damage to the other students because, by paying more attention to certain students, they are leaving others aside. This affects negatively since they do not receive enough input to develop all his abilities adequately. From my point of view, this is a contradiction since they are giving more attention or more input to those who do not need it and not the other way around.  In addition, they begin to feel themselves inferior.

Therefore, with this study, the main idea is confirmed: The expectations a teacher has about his students, directly influence their academic performance.

For that reason, as teachers we must be impartial and treat all children equally. Inevitably, as we are human, we will have favouritism towards our students. And, without realizing it, we put aside other children. But we must be professionals and we must remember that our goal is to ensure that all our students develop their skills to the fullest.