Washable Dry Erase Marker and 32 Learning Cards product reviews

As a home-schooling parent, trying to decide if Mr4 is better off at a public school or home with us, it's things like these that give me the confidence to lean towards home-schooling a second child. The young fella took to these like a duck to water. He loved the interaction, but also the challenge presented.

Not only has he picked up the names of a huge range of colours and shapes, but his reading and number skills have already shown great advances, and it's only been a week and a bit! The colours were a breeze, as I was able to draw little pictures of things he was familiar with and link them to certain colours. He knows that his favourite apples are red and green, so a small apple drawn on the red and green cards helped to link those colours to well-known objects and gave him a 50:50 chance of getting it right.

I wear a lot of T-shirts with writing on them, and I don't think any two shirts use the same font, and the little man always found it a challenge to identify various letters because they never seemed to look the same. With the use of these cards I have been able to show him commonalities between letters regardless of font or style, and his joy at discovering all these letters that were once relegated to the mental "too hard to decipher" box are actually recognisable to him now.

Overall, though I am not too sure how long these will remain "really useful" I can easily see them as remaining "something usable" for quite a while... and because they are dry-erase and can be reused in any number of creative ways, they are a great 'investment' for those with young children who may need a little bit of help with the literacy and numeracy skills. I can see them fitting in really well with smaller pre-school classes too. The only thing I found was that they can be rather tough to wipe down. I found a SLIGHTLY damp cloth or paper towel did an amazing job.

As with the Crayola Activity Books these cards are a complete winner in our house. Each set of 32 Dry Erase Learning Flash Cards comes with a Dry Erase Washable pen inside the box. Very easy to get out.

The flash cards are all double sided and durable. Although they can bend they are fairly robust and won't damage easily.
Each of the four packs are Monster themed so will all be okay to use with Boys and girls.

Numbers - the numbers card set goes from 1 - 25 which is perfect for preschoolers and new entrants who are expected to be able to grasp 1-20 very quickly.

The number cards had the number i.e. 2 on one side with the instruction to trace the number with your finger and then on the back the number with instructions like "decorate the 2. Draw two puppies." Each card thus has the numeral and the written number and the child has to group. I.e. a set of three threes.

These cards were fun and I liked out simply the concepts are put out there for children to learn. We love this set.

Letters - like the activity book each card has upper and lower case letters and stroke instructions on one side and space to practice writing on the other. "trace and print". Fantastic set that means that you can have a group of children all practicing different letters at once if you wanted.

Colours - My favourite thing about this set is that all the coloured objects are photos of real items. I.e broccoli, peas, iguana, leaf on the green. Brilliant. This was a fun set to use and it is great with my one year old as well for naming objects. This set I have out to use with her as its great to have real pictures.

Shapes - Well this set was good for me. Rhombus, parallelograms, trapezoids even I was challenged with this set lol!! Great to move on from triangles, squares and circles. This set is brilliant.

Overall just fantastic. Meets the needs of all of my children and is a must have educational, learning resource that is 100% mess free.

Thanks Crayola!!

When I was offered a chance to review these I was very excited. I have been a New Entrant teacher and I am now home-based educarer. I am keen to use a variety of methods to teach the children basic concepts such as colour, shapes, numbers and letters. I have used these with seven children aged three and four years. As expected the older children coped better with the activities than the younger ones. They all loved them for the bright colours and characters on the cards.

I liked that the packs went beyond the basics that most educational resources cover. The numbers went up to 25, more complex shapes like trapezoids and parallelograms were included. I was also pleased to see that it was English rather than American spelling used.

I was impressed with the quality of the product. They are built to last. The learning cards are made of a strong material that hasn't ripped despite being well used by my kids. I have used lots of dry erase cards over my years as an educator and most of them don't wipe clean as easily as these do and get a build up of maker over time. We wiped then clean using a dry cloth or a tissue.

There were a couple of things I was surprised with. Firstly the markers were very small. I would have thought they would have been the size of a regular whiteboard marker especially as it is a product design for you children. I also wondered if the cards had been tested on children as some of the instructions are confusing. In the shapes set the child is asked to "Circle 3 rectangles." When I did this card with the children they heard circle and so they went straight to the circle on the page. Another example is in the numbers pack where the instruction says "Decorate the 0 using your favourite colour" yet the pack only comes with a black marker.

I have shown these cards to my visiting teachers (qualified early childhood teachers) and they have been very impressed with them and are looking into buying some for the other educarers.

Having used both the learning cards and the books there are definite advantages to both. The cards were great for when I had several children working at the same time because they could all work on their own card doing a variation on the same activity (a different colour, number, shape or colour to their peers). I could also pull out the cards that I wanted the children to focus on. The books were great when I was just working with one child as there was nothing to tidy up and no cards to lose.

We received all four sets of Learning cards to review. My girl is in her second term of primary and I have been looking at things like this in the stores. I wanted some kind of flash card system to help her, especially with numbers and counting past 10. These are really excellent.

The whiteboard marker is similar to the way they work in her classroom. She can use it easily, erase it easily (no tears!). I love that the marker is washable, because kids don't care about their clothes when they are being creative.

Also, recently she has taken a shine to Monsters Inc, the movie. So the monster theme was very welcome.

About Dry-Erase Learning Flash Cards - Colours
My kid is pretty good with her colours, but this showed her the words for the colour as well. She also liked finding the items that were her favourite colour.

About Dry-Erase Learning Flash Cards - Numbers & Counting
These cards are great. They encourage number work between 0 - 25. A friend thought this was a bit much to expect from a 5 year old. But she is expected to be able to count backwards from 20 at school, so I think the number range was good.

About Dry-Erase Learning Flash Cards - Shapes
These cards are a mix of flashcards to help your child learn the names of shapes, allow them to trace the shape then asks them to draw freehand. There are also games like maps so you follow the squares or the circles to make the map path. Matching shapes was a favourite.

About Dry-Erase Learning Flash Cards - Letters
I liked that this encouraged her to trace the letter shape with her finger first. She tends to form her letters from the bottom to the top so really needs to practice this skill from top to bottom. She can do these over and over again. The map and dot-to-dot games were really neat ways to help her remember the alphabet sequence.