How To Protect Your Flashcards Jeanne Chang July 11, 2019

How To Protect Your Flashcards

Flashcards book

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!

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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!

Available in the US at Gloria’s Bookstore

 

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