Digital Flashcard Screensaver - Thinking "Inside" The Box

It dawned on me, while I was busy helping the children cut, and paste all those bird pictures onto note cards yesterday, that the pictures could also be used as flashcards on the computer.

All I needed to do was bring up each picture in our computer's paint program, and add a label, with the name of the bird, across the bottom.

Actually, I went ahead and copied an entire new set of pictures, for the children's computer (the one they use for homework, and games), this time mainly copying from All About Birds, The CornellLab of Ornithology site, so we would have the same birds, but different pictures or poses, than those on our paper flashcards.

I saved them all into a single photo file, and set that file as the computer's screen saver.

The computer is in D's room, because he has little interest in playing on it, so I don't have to constantly be checking in on it (and him) during nap time, and because it's an easy room to monitor from the living room, when the rest of the children are up, and using it. Now, instead of having it sit dark, and idle, while D (age 8) plays with Legos, or other toys, during the afternoon quiet time, it can be silently flashing through the birds from our area we're learning to identify.

D loves it. And, I'm already thinking about future uses for the screensaver, like flashcards of sharks of world, local flowers, foreign language vocabulary, pictures of sign language symbols...there are so many possibilities.

It's great to be a homeschooler.