What is THIS?

Pocket Flash Cards on Amazon.com

Beware, parents!  Someday the tables will be turned on you.  Maybe sooner than you expect. 

I'm sure most of you have seen...maybe even have...a stack or two of flash cards that look something like this laying around.  I mean, that's what good parents do right?  We fill our kid's heads chock full of the reams of knowledge they'll need to be productive members of society...or at least so they'll know the difference between a sock and a mitten (though, heck, if I were cold, either would do to keep my hands warm...just sayin).  Then, we arm ourselves with a stack of these babies so we can quiz our offspring to see what factoid morsels are sticking. 

For the record, we have at least four stacks of flash cards in our house.  What can I say...we're ambitious.  OK, so maybe I bought two starter sets then later stumbled on cards I thought had prettier pictures...but that's neither here nor there.  Ours get a lot of use, if you consider playing 100 card pick up with the alphabet flash cards "use".  I take that back...on occasion, both SweetPea and Lil Buddy have pulled out a deck of cards and asked to play actual learning games with them.  It's one of those occasions that I wanted to share...

Late last week, in the evening, after dinner, I found Lil Buddy sitting in the living room in a sea of flash cards.  Great, I thought, another game of flash card pick up.  Then I noticed he was actually looking at the pictures, telling himself what the picture was, then picking up another...and another...and another.  Perfect learning opportunity, I figured.  I sat next to him and he held up a card for me.  It was a green oval. 

"That's green, Bud", I said.

"No!  OVAL, Momma", he corrected me.

Oops.  My bad.  He picked up card after card and quizzed me on them.  When I got it right, it went something like this...

"Five stars", I said.

"Yes, five stars, good job!", he praised.

When I got it wrong, he let me know.  Of course part of the game was for me to figure out what exactly the right answer was.  If he held up a card with a red square on it and I said it was a "square" when the answer he was looking for was "red", then I got a resounding "No!"  If I tried to cover with "Yes, it's a red square", he'd shoot me down "No, Momma, red!" at which I'd have to concede, "No, you're right, it's red."

That night I got a little payback for all of the times that I'd tried to cram a lesson down their throats.  I also learned "the agony of defeat" when I didn't get the answer right.  I'll be honest...I had fun doing it.  Little did he know, but I had a little bit of reverse psychology going on and I still got him to learn as he was "teaching" me.  Muahahahaha!