Flashcards are expensive! For a while I kept the few cards that we were learning in an envelope. But inevitably one would get creased, colored on, or lost. Boo! I wanted something my kids could use for car trips, but imagine if they dropped a stack of flashcards in the car?! My suggestion for protecting your flashcards? Put them in an mini photo album!
We have many sets of flashcards. Many years ago I purchased the Chineasy flashcards because I like the idea of illustrating the characters. The concept really spoke to me, being that I’m a designer and all. These flashcards are $20 for 60 cards. Pretty expensive considering your child can learn 20 characters using a free app! But at the time I had a newborn and it was one of the first Chinese related purchase I made for him.
I really love the square flashcards created by fellow mom, Shih Ting Huang. I purchased the set of 600 characters for $50.50 (included shipping). The cards are very rigid and have a coating that are slightly water resistant. I know this from experience with 2 toddlers at the time! Since I can only read a few characters, I was manually translating these cards. Luckily I didn’t have to do too many because my kids were so young and not ready for flashcards. If you can read Chinese, these cards are top notch!
Chineasy and Shih Ting Huang Flashcards
C-Pen Flashcards in a 3×5 photo album
The set we get the most use out of are the flashcards by C-Pen. They are $43 (including shipping). The C-Pen works with the flashcards so I don’t have to translate. Thank goodness! I wish these were available before I purchased the previous set. I can attest that the C-Pen flashcards are not water-resistant at all! They dry okay though and look as good as new.
We use these flashcards with Sagebooks. And now Sagebooks has their own flashcards, but I am not buying another set of flashcards! Instead I took the time to find the C-Pen flashcards that go with each book. It takes time to sort through 400 flashcards! You’ll end up missing a couple flashcards for each Sagebook. This is where C-Pen’s blank cards come in handy!
For those of you with the C-Pen flashcards, they loosely fit an album for 3×5 inch photos. Surprisingly this size is hard to find now. Back in the day it was a common size. Perhaps you still have one of these stashed away, or you’ll get lucky and find one at the dollar store. I purchased this one from Amazon because I couldn’t find a locally. The Fuji Instax-Wide photo albums might be a better fit, but the album was double the cost as a 3×5 photo book. I suspect the C-pen cards may fit a Pokemon Go album. The measurements are very close.
C-Pen also sells clear binder sheets that fit their cards, but I don’t plan to carry a binder around. Plus the cards are facing the wrong way! I’m not a genius for thinking of this but I do love that I can throw this small album in my purse for car rides, dining out, etc. Hope you found this mommy hack helpful 🙂
*Update 11/02/2020. C-pen has new custom albums that fit their flashcards. Woo hoo! They are sold in sets of 3 albums that each holds 40 flashcards. The clear sleeves allow you to see the front and back of the cards. There are 6 album designs, pink fox shown below. This is a nice way to protect your flashcards. Much easier to use than the binder size sleeves. These small albums fit in a purse for learning on-the-go!
