Who's Who and Who's New: 5 Ways To Use Trading Cards in Your Classroom

Hey everyone! It’s Mr. Elementary and I’m stoked to be your guest blogger today on Who’s Who and Who’s New! If you check out my blog or my TPT Store you’ll notice that I’m kind of crazy about educational trading cards! In this post I’m going to share 5 ways you can use them with your students.

What is an educational trading card anyway?

Educational Trading Cards are a fun and engaging way for students to learn new vocabulary and information in a way that that they’ll remember. Typically when I make educational trading cards they include the vocabulary word and a picture to represent it on the front; on the back is its definition and other facts or information to helps students remember it. I always include a blank set of the cards for students to add to or create their own.

Here are 5 ways you can use them in your classroom!

1. SMART Board or Projector: Project just the picture up on the wall and have students determine the definition using the pictures and their background knowledge. Then, scroll down and review the actual definitions.

2. Positive Reinforcement: Pass trading cards out as (educational) rewards during a unit. In GLAD you choose students to be “scouts” who look for classmates exhibiting positive behavior while you’re teaching and they get to reward the cards to their classmates.

3. Memory Matching Game: To play this game, simply print the fronts and the backs of the cards out single sided and have the students, or yourself, cut them up. Have students pair up, shuffle the cards, and lay them face down in rows. Students can then play memory with the cards by taking turns flipping them over until they find a match (the picture side of the card and the definition side). Once they find the match they get to keep those two cards. Whichever player has the most cards at the end of the game wins!

4. Challenge Activity: Trading Cards are EASY to differentiate. If a student doesn’t find the vocabulary challenging enough they can simply find more vocabulary words along the same subject and create their own trading cards to go along with them.

5. Homework: After you have introduced a new set of vocabulary trading cards to the class you can send the blank cards home as homework for students to work on. Families will think they’re a fun alternative to the traditional worksheet style of homework and may be more likely to get involved.