This week, we received an email from one of our teachers in North Carolina. She was looking for some direction to incorporate the flashcards that are at the end of each notebook. She teaches high school students.
Note: If you’ve come across this page but aren’t familiar with LearnEd Notebooks, click here for more information about how they can transform your science classroom!
As we pulled together some resources for her, it only made sense to turn it into our latest free resource on here. Because when one person has questions, usually others do too! (Just like in your classroom ?). Here are 4 flash card resources to help you make the most of flashcards with your high schoolers.
1. Responsibility. At the high school level, keep in mind that the flashcards are there to help your students remember the terms that necessary to understanding the concepts. It can be something that you touch on as a whole class, but the responsibility to review the vocabulary words is the students’ responsibility. Spending as little as 5 minutes at home, on the bus, at lunch, or anywhere else can make a huge impact. As older students, it’s their job to shoulder some of the responsibility.
RELATED: 8 WAYS TO HELP STUDENTS FORM BETTER STUDY HABITS
2. Reinforce with classroom activities. Help them find motivation to study on their own time by using a few minutes of class time regularly. A flash card favorite is to play some sort of review game with them. (I usually just borrow the flash cards from a student near me.) Even something as simple as using 10 minutes of class time, you can separate the students into 2 teams and have them do a whiteboard race. Something that simple once a week can really inspire your students to review the definitions from the unit.
Some of our top vocabulary resources include:
- Valuable Vocabulary Graphic Organizer
- I Have, Who Has…? Review Game
- 8 Easy, Fun, Interactive Vocab Strategies
3. Effective study method. This website details a very effective way to use flashcards when studying for a cumulative test. (It’s geared towards preparing for the SAT but has good information that can apply to any type of summative test.) The “Two-Stack Method” For Easily Studying Flashcards works like this: students keep 10-20 flashcards in their daily stack and go through them every day. Each time a daily card is learned successfully, it gets moved to the weekly stack. Select a day that the weekly stack gets reviewed so that those terms aren’t lost. Any time a weekly card isn’t correctly answered, it goes back to the daily stack until it can be moved out. If there are more than 20 cards in the daily stack, hold off on adding new cards until some can be moved over to the weekly stack.
4.Don’t lose them! With flashcards, having a strategy to keep up with them is crucial. You can’t use them very effectively if you don’t know where they are! Using an envelope in the binder or interactive notebook is usually the best way to ensure they aren’t lost.
Check out these two ideas from our Notebooking Strategies board on Pinterest:
This pin offers a different style of envelope.
This one uses a small bag.
All of these methods are aimed at keeping students organized. If you’re working with the two-stack method, a rubber band or paperclip for each stack would be necessary as well.
RELATED: HOW LABS AND EXPERIMENTS CAN SAVE TIME
We love hearing from our teachers! Email us if you have a question, need some direction, or just want to tell us you love using LearnEd Notebooks in your classroom, we want to hear from you! Sometimes we all just need a fresh way to look at things and we’re here for that too! Our whole company is made up of teachers so we understand the battles you’re facing.
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LearnEd Notebooks provides teachers and students with an innovative notebooking solution. We specialize in providing educators with a unique curriculum that allows you to break free from conventional methods of instruction and spend more time on labs and inquiry-based science. We provide the framework of an interactive notebook with the flexibility of teaching strategies that seamlessly integrate with each teacher’s own methods of instruction. Our complete programs include printed student notebooks, digital presentations, and access to teacher resources — each focusing on diverse learning styles and engaging instructional strategies.
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