Використання флеш-карток на уроках англійської мови

Good Old FLASHCARDS

Nowadays the development of education has stepped forward and we have plenty of modern technologies. They provide a high level of foreign language learning. Though I always try to follow recent tendencies in my profession, still there are classical methods that cannot be ignored. As I work mostly in primary school, in my work I actively use flash cards.  Flash cards are a simple, versatile, yet often underexploited resource. Teachers should aim to appeal to all the children during the lessons and in primary school it is particularly important to appeal to visual source of information, according to the peculiarities of their age as a very high proportion of learners have this type of intelligence. Flash cards can be bright and colourful and make a real impact on pupils.

For learners in primary school, flash cards can be used in conjunction with word cards. These are simply cards that display the written word with/without transcription. Word cards should be introduced well after the pictorial cards so as not to interfere with correct pronunciation.

Flash cards are a really handy resource to have and can be useful at every stage of the class activity. They are a great way to present, practise and recycle vocabulary. I sometimes get the students to make their own sets of mini flash cards that can be taken home for them to play with, with parents and siblings. 

During the lessons I actively use flash cards while learning lexics. Flashcards can be used in every stage of mastering new words.

Flash cards is the tool I always use with learners of any age group, and there is a great deal of activities and games where a teacher can use flash cards. Indeed, flash cards (including ones in electronic form) are definitely an essential tool. They are visually stimulating, can be used in endless possible ways for various types of activities on all levels. They allow flexible modification for any theme and according to any child type, so developing a personalized flashcards portfolio is one of the most effective ways to enrich one’s teaching experience. 

There are so many things we can do with flash cards and having a number of quick flash card games and activities up your sleeves really helps when going through your vocab teaching routine.

I would like to present you some activities that children like most and that can be used in different stages of vocab learning with both picture flash cards and word flash cards. As we are learning clothes vocab with the pupils of the second grade I would like to present you some activities on this topic.

The first kind of activity can be named: Fast as Rabbit. I put some flashcards on the board and divide the class into two teams facing the cards. I say a words from the flash cards and the first member of each team is to touch the correct flash card on the board as fast as they can. Also instead of pictures we can use word flash cards. Moreover, I can tell and show the picture of the word or just silently show the picture and children are to show the written word. The winner is who touches more flash cards first correctly. 

The next activity is the following. I have chosen six flash cards and placed them on the board and have given each card a number from one to six. I break down  the class into two teams or just need two participants to help me. Then I give a pupil a dice of roll and he is to name the picture according to the number that comes up. And we do it in turns! If nobody knows the vocabulary card, we introduce it and have the students repeat it. They’ll try hard to remember so they can answer it correctly the next time. On the next stage of this activity you can suggest your pupils to make up word combinations with these words or even sentences.

If it becomes easy, I begin replacing the cards on the board with new cards.

Sometimes we make sets of cards and then we may play the following game. Each pupil has identical set of cards with clothing. They pick 2 or 3 cards to work with. On the first stage, when we just learn the words, I am to show the pupils the picture of the piece of clothing and name it and those who have the same should stand up and display the picture and pronounce the name of clothing.

The next stage is when I just name the picture, without showing it to the class, and the children are to stand  up and display the picture.

And the last but not least stage is when I show the written word and the children are to stand up, to display the picture and to name it!

So, we’ve learned many words and now we are to learn how to use them in the word-combinations and in the sentences. For that reason, I use paper dolls. And again, children love to make these dolls and clothes by themselves. There are a lot of variations with the dolls. First, they can dress their dolls and simply tell about the clothes using words-combination: red shirt, black tie, long skirt. Then they introduce them into sentences: Tom has got blue jeans. Ann has got red dress. Tom wears yellow jacket. And at the last stage they make up short stories about their characters recollecting all the learnt vocab: Tis is Tom. He is 8. He is a pupil. He can jump. Tom has got a funny robot. He wears red shirt, blue jeans and brown boots. Tom is a kind boy.

To sum it all up, I can say that flash cards burn information into the brain as they engage active recall.  Each time a pupil practices this process it means that they are forcing their brain to remember a concept. This makes using flashcards such a compelling method of memorization and developing a pupil’s creativity.