Getting Actual Use Out of Preschool Prep Company Multiplication Flashcards
The Preschool Prep Company Meet The Math Facts Multiplication Flashcards follow a specific drill sequence designed to move kids from slow recall to automaticity. Each card shows a multiplication problem on one side and the answer on the other. The set is organized by fact family, not random order, which matters more than people realize when your child starts developing avoidance tactics around certain tables. I spent about three years working with parents and teachers who bought these flashcards and then watched them gather dust in a drawer. The problem was never the product itself. It was the implementation. The flashcards work, but they require a consistent daily session of about five minutes, not a once-a-week marathon that turns into a power struggle. That mismatch between expectations and reality is where most families fail. The flashcard set covers multiplication facts from 0 through 12, arranged in groups. Each group introduces a new fact family and recycles previously learned facts within the same session. The structure is deliberate. A typical drill might look like this: you present five problems from fact family 3, then five from fact family 7, then four from fact family 2, mixing the old with the new so retention gets tested constantly.
How to Actually Use Preschool Prep Company Meet The Math Facts Multiplication Flashcards
Set a timer for five minutes. Present cards one at a time. Your child says the answer out loud. If they get it right within two seconds, flip the card and move on. If they hesitate past two seconds or get it wrong, mark that card with a paperclip or rubber band and continue. At the end of the five minutes, go through only the marked cards and repeat until they clear. That is the full method. It takes exactly what the instructions describe and not fifteen minutes of negotiation. The two-second rule is important. It is the threshold between recall and calculation. If a child is counting on fingers or mentally adding, they have not actually learned the fact. They are deriving it. The goal of these flashcards is storage, not derivation. You want the answer to come out fast enough that it looks like it was pulled from memory rather than computed on the spot. I had a specific issue with a student who kept going back to the card with 7 times 8, no matter how many times we ran through the marked deck. We did it for two weeks straight and the card stayed marked. The problem was not repetition. The problem was that the child had paired that fact with a visual strategy involving hand gestures, and every time we removed the gesture, the recall collapsed. The workaround was simple: I let him keep using the hand cue for that single fact while we eliminated cues for everything else. Within three weeks he dropped the gesture and the fact stuck. Sometimes partial reliance is faster than total elimination.
The flashcards themselves are standard index card size, about 3 by 5 inches, printed on matte stock. The numbers are large and centered. There is no artwork or cartoon character on the face of the card. This is by design. Distraction is the enemy of fluency building. The back has the answer printed in a smaller font so you can glance at it without handing the card back to the child immediately. One thing people miss is that the order of introduction matters. The Preschool Prep method introduces facts in a sequence that minimizes interference between similar-looking problems. They do not throw 6 times 7 and 7 times 8 at a child on the same day early in the process. If you are following along with the accompanying workbook or DVD series, the schedule is already mapped out. Going out of order creates unnecessary collisions in memory.
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What These Flashcards Don't Do Well
They do not teach the conceptual basis of multiplication. If a child has never encountered the idea that 4 times 5 means four groups of five, these flashcards will produce a kid who can recite answers quickly but cannot explain why the answer is twenty. That gap shows up later in word problems and fraction work. Use manipulatives like counters or arrays alongside the cards, even briefly, to ground the abstract symbols in something physical. The set also assumes a certain level of print reading ability. The problems are written numerically. A child who is still sounding out numbers will slow down on the reading itself and confuse that bottleneck with a math deficiency. If your child struggles with number recognition, spend time on that separately before launching into timed drills. Another limitation is the scope. The cards cover all facts from 0 to 12, but mastery is not binary. A child might answer 9 times 4 correctly at speed on Tuesday and then blank on it Thursday. That is normal. Spaced repetition outlasts single sessions. Running the same five-minute drill four or five days a week produces better long-term retention than one longer session on Saturday.
If you find that your child is getting through the entire deck in under two minutes with high accuracy across all fact families, you may have outgrown the flashcards. At that point the drill becomes maintenance rather than acquisition, and adding a timed competition element or switching to mixed random-order drills keeps the challenge appropriate. Some parents move to digital apps at this stage for variety, though the core mechanism remains the same. The physical cards are durable enough for regular handling but they do not have a storage box included in most versions. Keep them in a plastic sleeve or small binder clip folder. Loose cards in a drawer get lost. I have seen entire sets go missing because they were stored loosely in a bookshelf bin alongside other school supplies. There is no parent tracking sheet built into the product. If you want data on progress, you will need to maintain your own record. A simple spreadsheet with dates and error counts per fact family does the job. After about ten sessions you will see which facts are stable and which are regressing. That pattern tells you more than any score does.
