Anki - how do you set it up, use it, and from what age?

[EmilyGF]

How has it been useful to your homeschool?

 

What age was your child ready to use it?

 

Did you set up an account for each child?

 

What subjects did you use it for?

 

Thanks, Emily

[silver]

I use one account for our family and each child has a deck (with subjects as sub decks).

 

We use it for Bible memory verses, phonograms, and random memory things (their address, pledge of allegiance, mine and my husband's phone numbers, etc). It would be easy enough to use for math facts, spelling rules, vocabulary, or any other memory work. When we were using AAS, I put the rule cards in. We used it for learning the continents and oceans (I had a blank map on the card and they had to point to the continent or ocean named on the card).

 

My kids don't use it on their own right now. I read the card to them and rate how easy it was for them to answer. Mostly because most of the cards are phonograms, and I don't feel like recording/taking up space on my tablet with 74 different sound files for that.

[EmilyGF]

Thanks for the input! I hadn't thought about phonograms...

[HejKatt]

We used it for Chinese characters last year. Using the computer, I would enter the character on the front side, the PinYin (phonetic pronunciation) and an audio recording of me pronouncing it on the back/answer side. Then I would save the deck, and copy it onto my tablet.  DS would review that deck every school day, it took about 5-10 minutes. Because the answer side had the audio file as well as PinYin, he could check if he had recognized the character by himself and select the appropriate option (Answered Correctly/Review Later).  

I use one account for our family and each child has a deck (with subjects as sub decks).

 

We use it for Bible memory verses, phonograms, and random memory things (their address, pledge of allegiance, mine and my husband's phone numbers, etc). It would be easy enough to use for math facts, spelling rules, vocabulary, or any other memory work. When we were using AAS, I put the rule cards in. We used it for learning the continents and oceans (I had a blank map on the card and they had to point to the continent or ocean named on the card).

 

My kids don't use it on their own right now. I read the card to them and rate how easy it was for them to answer. Mostly because most of the cards are phonograms, and I don't feel like recording/taking up space on my tablet with 74 different sound files for that.

 

While we use it for memorizing small bits of information (foreign language vocab, math facts, state capitals), especially while in the car, I'm curious how you use it to memorize longer things, like the pledge?  Do you have the whole pledge on one card?  One stanza per card?

[silver]

I have the whole pledge on one card. The front is "Pledge of Allegiance" and the back is the pledge in its entirety.  My kids have heard the pledge being recited in union at 4-H meetings and various events, so it wasn't too hard. For something of similar length that didn't have that prior exposure, like a longer Bible verse, I do the first few exposures of the card with them. I'll say a chunk and have my kids repeat it. Each day I give progressively longer chunks until they can recite with minimal promptings. During the learning time, I always choose "again" so that the card will stay in the daily loop and not be marked as learned in the system. Once they can say the verse with minimal promptings, I mark it as "good" and it goes into the normal rotation.

You could also use a cloze card for initially learning it. With those, you mark portions of the text to be "removable" and Anki will generate cards with those portions missing. So part of the pledge would show up, and the student would have to fill in only the missing portion. Once the cloze cards are easy, you could replace them with a card that prompts for the entire thing. Here's the Anki manual page for cloze cards: http://ankisrs.net/docs/manual.html#cloze-deletion