ELC Flash Cards

My five year old daughter has just started taking off with her reading and to be honest, at the moment, she can just not get enough of it which is fantastic. Whenever we are out she is reading all the signs and notices that we pass and often asking me what are the words that she finds difficult. Her school is obviously doing a lot of work on phonics because any word that is phonically regular she is able to read with no problem. Unfortunately though, ...
...where phonics do not help to read them and there is no substitute to just knowing what the word says! With this thought in mind, I was on the look out for something to help her and spotted these flash cards in the Early Learning Centre.

There are seventy good quality cards in this pack (apparently made from forest friendly card) and each card has a word on each side giving you a total of 140 words for your child to become familiar with. ... more

My five year old daughter has just started taking off with her reading and to be honest, at the moment, she can just not get enough of it which is fantastic. Whenever we are out she is reading all the signs and notices that we pass and often asking me what are the words that she finds difficult. Her school is obviously doing a lot of work on phonics because any word that is phonically regular she is able to read with no problem. Unfortunately though, such as the English language is, we have many words where phonics do not help to read them and there is no substitute to just knowing what the word says! With this thought in mind, I was on the look out for something to help her and spotted these flash cards in the Early Learning Centre.

There are seventy good quality cards in this pack (apparently made from forest friendly card) and each card has a word on each side giving you a total of 140 words for your child to become familiar with. The words selected are the ones that are most used in everyday speech. There are also a number of blank cards where you can write the words that might be particularly important to your family like the names of brothers, sisters or friends. It is quite daunting having so many words to look at at one time though so it's probably best to sort them in to smaller groups. Also a lot of the words on the cards are actually phonically regular such as 'bed' so I don't think my daughter really needs to worry about these too much so I've put them to one side.

However, there are a lot of high frequency words that she does need to recognise so we have sorted these for her to take a look at. These include words such as 'do', 'she', 'they', 'was' and so on. At the moment I just want to help her recognise these words so I tend to show them one at a time and see whether she can tell us the word. She is actually getting very good at these and does not need to do this too much more but I am now starting to use them with her younger sister who is four next week. Another thing I like to do with them is spread out about a dozen words at one time on the table and get her to spot certain words.

However, as your child becomes more proficient with their reading, there are lots of other things that you can do with these cards. You can do sorting activities and get your child to put them in piles depending on what letter they start or end with. You can use them to start to understand alphabetical order, starting with just three or four words to put in order and gradually increasing the challenge. With so many words you can look at ordering words that start with the same letter and therefore looking at the second or even third placed letter in order to determine the order.

These words can even help your child to create simple sentences. Again there are enough words there to make a great variety of sentences but I do think that it requires the parent to do some sorting of the words in advance so that the task is not too difficult. Maybe you can find the words to make a sentence, mix them up and then get your child to have a go. Unfortunately, the sentences will not have capital letters and full stops though.

Finally I think that these cards will also help your child with spelling and you can use them with the Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check method that lots of schools use. You can do this by showing a word to your child. Get them to say the word and take notice of the order of the letters. Then cover the word while your child writes it down and then once they have written it they can check whether they have the correct spelling by having another look at the card.

These cards are really very versatile considering the number of different things you can use them for - much more versatile than I thought when I first opened the pack. They do look a little bit boring though because quite literally all they have on them is the word. It's a shame there are not small pictures or different colour words to help you sort them.

The cards come in a small box and cost £3.50. This seems quite expensive for a set of words and you could argue that you could just make some cards yourself but it's not quite the same. My daughter seems to think these are probably more special because they do come in their own package as well. Also I didn't have to think up all the words that would have been a chore.

Overall I think these cards are pretty good for helping children to read and I like the way there is so much you can do with them. They are quite motivating but, as with many things, I do think you need to take the lead from your child and not do too much with them unless they are in the mood. It's definitely a good way of making reading fun with your child.
 

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