The student sees the word and says the fact and its answer. When a child is first learning facts, I recommend beginning with the reverse side of the cards: the side which has both the question and its answer. There should be no fewer than sixty cards in the deck. This procedure allows your child to move as quickly as his knowledge of the facts permits. To eliminate this, shuffle the card deck and then lay the cards face up in rows on a table so that the child can point to or touch each card and say the answers. Only this time, it is imposed by the parent's skill at flipping cards.

$touch point math flash cards$

Again there is a ceiling effect on the student's performance. This means that the child has to wait for the parent and can only answer questions as fast as the parent is flipping the cards. Sometimes parents try to resolve this problem by flipping the flashcards for the child. This limitation imposes an artificial ceiling on their performances, which is a direct result of their lack of dexterity and has little to do with their knowledge of the material under study. Most students have difficulty flipping more than 50 cards per minute. We expect students to reach a score of between 60 and 80 simple arithmetic facts per minute in order to be considered fluent. Children, especially younger ones, cannot flip flashcards fast enough to reach high levels of performance. Having used this procedure with thousands of children over the past 25 years, we have made a few observations. A child could have SAFMEDS in Geography (states and their capitals), French, Spanish and/or English (vocabulary), chemistry (formulas and symbols), physics (the elements of the periodic table), etc. The SAFMEDS procedure captures and records the daily number of facts or cards that the student can complete in a dedicated period of time, usually one minute. In the hands of Precision Teachers, flashcards became SAFMEDS, which stands for 'Say All Facts 1 Minute Each Day (Shuffled).' This simple change converts your task as a homeschool teacher from helping your child arrive at some (undetermined) level of knowledge to a simple daily practice procedure for as many sets of facts as the student is currently learning. Results for each student on each of the topics under study are charted on a special graph that depicts the rate of growth of the skill being learned. This permits easy decisions about where the learner is now, how far they currently are from the standard, and how fast they are moving towards the accepted standard. The method provides a means for direct comparison of any learner's current performance against an established standard. The standards are based on the performances of thousands or hundreds of thousands of other samples of performances on the same task provided by other learners of the same age, sex, race, or other identifying criterion. In Precision Teaching, samples of learning are gathered for a specific period of time and the results are compared to a known standard. They may only have perfect or slightly less than perfect understanding of a small portion of the information.Īn alternative to this situation has been created by a group of educators who use a method known as Precision Teaching. That does not mean that they have fluent knowledge of the entire set of information. If learners are slow and deliberate, they may only flip a few cards and may answer those few absolutely perfectly. Some people set a level of 90 percent or 100 percent correct as the criterion for success on a set of flashcards.

This can be time-consuming, but in many cases the learner can make his or her own set of flashcards.Īnother issue is trying to determine when the student knows the flashcard materials well enough to move on. The major problem is that you may not be able to find a commercially available set of the cards you need to practice a specific skill. Most flashcards are designed to be self-checking with the question on one side and the question and/or answer on the reverse side.įlashcards tend to work reasonably well as a practice medium. To promote independent practice, parents sometimes rely on flashcards, especially for learning concepts like arithmetic facts. Practice almost always requires the time and attention of a monitor or coach. In order to become fluent with almost any concept, operation or set as facts, students often need a lot of practice.

Touch point math flash cards