Things continue to go pretty well in my journey to teach my daughter French, my and — what will hopefully one day also become — her third language. Today, I share with you another find which is helping us along the way: flashcards.
I’ve always loved flashcards because they bring back a lot of memories of when I was a child and I was learning English back in Peru. Of course, the ones I used were not the sophisticated ones available today, but rather the ones made by hand (by my mom — in my case — or a preschool teacher) de cartulina blanca with a a pretty simple drawing and its accompanying name on the bottom. I think on some of them the level of sophistication went as high as maybe having a stamp or being in color. (Do any of you out there know what I’m talking about?)
Anyhow, all this to say that I remember learning a lot of English vocabulary just by playing games with these home-made flashcards con mi mamá. To be completely honest, this isn’t something I’ve implemented at home in terms of my daughter’s learning of English or Spanish. Since we use the mL@H method at home, it just didn’t seem necessary in either language. I mean, we only speak to Vanessa in Spanish, so she learns new vocabulary in it by virtue of using it on a daily basis. English we leave up to preK and the rest of her non-Spanish interactions around our neighborhood. But, because French is a language that we’re just beginning to introduce and I’m the only one she knows right now who speaks it, I’ve been definitely interested in enlisting the help of flashcards to expand her vocabulary.
We recently got a set from a company called Blinguals (Aff) which offers flashcards in 15 different languages, including the most common ones, but also Turkish, Korean and Arabic. The illustrations are colorful and the same characters, a boy and a girl, appear throughout the set to depict all kinds of different common words on each card. The words include things like the colors, food items, animals, body parts, and modes of transportation. All excellent beginning words which will help broaden your child’s vocabulary. One of the things I really like about the flashcards is their size, just like a deck of playing cards, which means I can take them with us wherever we go.
But what I like the most about these flashcards is that you can choose whatever language combination you want. In other words, I was able to choose the Spanish/French flashcards which works perfect in our household since we only speak Spanish to our children. While the other sets of flashcards we own are in English/French and I can still use them by translating the English part to Spanish, my daughter is already at at the stage where she’s asking what language things are written in and so she’s looking more intently at the letters and words.
THE GIVEAWAY!
This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to the winner #1 Grace!
We have one set of Blinguals flashcards to give away to one winner. To enter please visit the Blinguals website and come back here to tell us something you learned while you were there.
That’s all you have to do to enter this giveaway. If you want to up your chances at winning, then this is how you can get additional entries (only after you’ve completed the step above):
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This giveaway ends Sunday, January 30 at midnight EST and you must have a valid US address to enter.
Disclosure: We received a sample to review the product. All opinions are our own.
i subscribe!
Great website with tons of resources – love the emphasis on illustration as common ground btwn languages.
I subscribe via RSS
The Bilinguals website offers great learning tips
I tweeted! http://twitter.com/#
I’m subscribe via RSS
I like the website and i also like is that the bilingual flash cards are designed to look like a story book,. My son love to read and i know that he would be sooo happy with them.
Thank you!!!!!
I follow you on Twitter and I tweeted! ( http://twitter.com/#!/ahappymom )
Love that i can use them during our story time!
I learned that if a child is consistently exposed to a language for less than 20% of waking hours, she will end up being a “passive” bilingual.
Wow, that is exactly what has happened to my daughter! We need help!
Here are my thoughts on using flashcards as a language learning tool with toddlers, along with some suggestions for activities to better exploit them:
http://babybilingual.blogspot.com/2010/06/flashes-of-brilliance.html
Thanks for telling us about this company–I like the idea of being able to choose the languages that appear on the cards!