How Effective are Flash Cards in Early Childhood Education?

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It’s been about two weeks since I first started using my own tailor-made flash cards on my son so I thought it was about time I wrote an update on how it was going.  Gavin is still showing a lot of interest in his flash cards -- especially the ones with Thomas and trains featuring largely.  I find that the flash cards work pretty well, as long as he’s interested in going through them.

For instance, here’s a video of Gavin going through the Thomas flash cards on colours:

He used to only be able to relate to colours based on the names of the Thomas and Friends trains.  For instance, the colour green would not be “green” to Gavin, it was initially “Percy“, and then “Percy colour”.  If his green crayon rolled under the chair, he would tell me Percy was under there.  After I started using the slides, he can now tell me green is green, although the phrase he will use might be “green, Percy colour” or something to that effect.

And this is Gavin running through the Thomas alphabet flash cards:

He’s picked up the new words I inserted pretty quickly, but I find his recall for some are much quicker than others.  For instance, he learned words like “valley” and “viaduct” fairly quickly but still forgets words like “x-ray” and “vase”.

Recently, I stopped focusing on the letters from the alphabet and just concentrated on the word.  I think perhaps I ought to start going back to “A is for…, B is for…” because Gavin has demonstrated an ability to recognised letters he sees in other context.  For instance, he saw a word beginning with “g” today and said, “Gorno (his pronunciation for “Gordon”) G”.  Then when we were at the shopping mall, he pointed out the name of a shop beginning with “g” and repeated the same phrase.

His pick up rate has been pretty fast.  We don’t go through the slides every day -- maybe just one every couple of days and when we do, we usually just run through them once and I’ll give him a train sticker for his effort.  To reinforce his interest to learn, I let him choose a train sticker from his Thomas Sticker Express book after he completes a round through the slides.  He’s gotten so attuned to getting the stickers that he’ll offer me some self-praise as if to tell me he deserves another sticker: “Baby good job.  More sticky (his current pronunciation for sticker).”

I mentioned that the flash cards work well only if Gavin is willing to go through them.  So this is the hitch I have run into:  Thomas and Friends can only be used in flash cards up to a certain point (alphabets, numbers, and colours) before I have to start using non-Thomas flash cards to create new learning material.  The problem with non-Thomas flash cards (such as the ones I made on introducing animals, fruits and vegetables -- which I have yet to post up) is that Gavin simply isn’t interested in them.  When I open up the file, he’ll start exclaiming, “train, train, train!”  There’s little point trying to run through a set of slides if your toddler isn’t interested in them.

Luckily, I’ve discovered another method to teach Gavin about animals, fruits and vegetables…

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