#ColorizeYourClassroom with Astrobrights – Flashcard Freebie

This is a sponsored post. Kinder-Craze has received payment, trade and/or products from Astrobrights in exchange for promoting, however all opinions stated are my own. This post also contains affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase through one of my links, which helps to support the blog.

Summer is the time to gear up for the new school ahead and DREAM of how beautiful your classroom will be in the fall. So when Astrobrights contacted me to help launch their #ColorizeYourClassroom campaign by inspiring my readers to include more color in their classroom and host a giveaway, I couldn’t say no.

It’s no secret that I have a bit of a love affair with bright colors. My entire classroom is designed around Melanie’s Rainbow Chalkboard collection at Schoolgirl Style. Yes, it safe to say I love to surround myself in COLOR.  In addition to my personal preference, there are several convincing arguments for the value of including lots of bright colors into the learning environment.
According to the Color Marketing Group, studies have shown that:

COLOR can make learning a more fun and impactful experience
COLOR accelerates learning by 55 to 78 percent
COLOR increases student comprehension by 73 percent

Now that you know a little about my color obsession, imagine my delight when I opened a giant box FILLED with all of these gorgeous paper and cardstock colors.

The sweet people at Astrobrights were even generous enough to supply me with a $50 Gift Card to Office Depot. I ran right out and stocked up on another one of my classroom essentials: Avery 5163 labels.

Fans always take note and ask about the beautiful alphabet word wall they see in the back of my classroom and I am frequently asked to share more detailed photos of the word wall.

At the beginning of the year, my word wall looks like this. Just a bunch of blank letters of the alphabet on an otherwise empty board.

As new sight words are introduced in class, they are added beside the appropriate beginning letter. The actual letters fill with collages throughout the year as well. You can read more about the alphabet aspect of my word wall by checking out this blog post. 

Each of the words on the word wall is easy to create using two of my favorite classroom supplies: Astrobrights cardstock and Avery 5163 labels. I’ll walk you through the process in the next few photos.

I printed my desired sight words for my word wall on the Avery 5163 labels, and I used my trusted paper cutter to cut cardstock into 3×5″ pieces.

These brightly colored cards grab a lot more attention that your standard white or pastel index cards.

From there, its as simple as “peel and stick” to create the words to display on my classroom word wall.

What I love most about the multicolored word backgrounds is that the colors are SOLID. Some critics of color argue that the use of bright colors in the classroom can lead to overstimulation and be distracting for children. I believe that colorizing with a PURPOSE has a tremendous value.

These sight word cards are a bold addition to my word wall, but the fact that they do not have a busy pattern around them helps hold student attention. I love that when a student is staring at 6 different words by the letter W, struggling to find “was”, I can instruct that student to look at the blue word. That instant recognition is the key to helping my students master their sight words without staring blankly at a wall of uniformly colored words.

After seeing how GORGEOUS these word cards turned out, I have also decided to create a duplicate set of words with the exact same colors to use as flashcards in the classroom.

Now my sight word flash cards will go from this:

To this:

Which do you think my students will prefer? Also, if a student always confuses the words “look” and “like” but I keep reminding the student that “like is the purple word,”which set of flashcards will be help that struggling student to master the word “like” more quickly?