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.
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.
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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.