States and Capitals Cards – October 5, 2010

Nice quality. Worked on states with my daughter this summer. Helpful to purchase a United States map as well to go along with it.

My kiddo was memorizing State/Capitols and this was a great set!Pros:Easy to readState on one Side/Capitol on the otherIncludes CountriesCons:NoneThere are so many games you can do with this set; we laid them all out and said the capitol and they had to pick the state and then reversed it. We also brought them along for a car trip and practiced while driving. Having the box made it easy to keep them all together.Would highly recommend if you are looking for a good study set for your kiddo.

My 6th grader has been prepping for her state capitols test for a month now and these have been great for practicing! The cards and a nice big size with bright colors and easy to read font! She has mastered all 50 after great practice sessions! We will hang into these for our other kiddos future use!

I absolutely love these simple flash cards! On one side is the state on the other is the capitol. The sides that have the states are colored with the state itself show in white, with the location of the capitol marked by a dot, just like shown on a map. The sides that hold the capitol are white, with the state once again shown, but in color. The cards are not see through, so when you hold them up neither side is visible from the opposite. In other words, you can drill from the capitol side, without the state showing through and vice versa. Also included are 36 country cards that have their capitol cities listed, including the US. These are easily sorted, because the country side is black as opposed to the states which are bright colors. I love these. They are perfect for my 5 year old. (And older kids)

These are well printed and suit a couple of purposes. If they match your needs, they're a good choice.We had a middle-schooler facing a test on all 50 states and their capitals, who also needed to identify the states by location on a map. No other data was being asked (like state nickname etc.) so we needed a plain interface like these cards have.You can see from the box cover that one side of each card shows where a state sits in the main continental US map (sorry, Alaska and Hawaii -- you have to sit in the margin again!) The other side shows the state capital and its location within the state.With a two-sided card there is only so much the designer can do, and I discovered that to quiz a student about what state is being shown by the map location, it is necessary to hide the state name (at the bottom of the card) with a finger or two while holding the card up. If you wanted to get carried away I suppose you could make a card holder that would hide the bottom inch or so, to do the same thing. Anyway, not counting the occasional slipped finger (or very long state name), this plan worked.You can of course do the quiz in reverse, showing the capital side and asking for the state name. Since the capital side of the card also shows the state shape, it is hard to quiz just on the capitals by name -- the state outline is sort of a hint, you might say.You can figure most of this out for yourself, I am just explaining what happened when we actually tried to use these to test the knowledge in multiple ways. The cards work primarily for matching capitals and state names. Recognizing shapes, or memorizing capitals without a visual prompt, requires slight adaptations as described here.Somebody else complained about the box being pre-opened. The box design is kind of weird and there are some flaps that are hot glued together, that come apart easily when you try to get the cards out. You end up with a sort of floppy thing that doesn't really hold the cards very well. That is probably what happened for that one customer, but I do not know why they concluded that the box had been opened or tampered with. It's just an odd packaging approach.The first time through the deck, this kid was doing so well, I felt I had just wasted $4! But the cards got pulled out later and re-used without any adult prompting, so I guess they were appealing to read and handle. Being able to shuffle the order is nice, compared to reading from a list on paper. if you have multiple users (big family or lots of friends) you will probably get more value from the set, and they are sturdy enough to last for a while -- if you can get them to stay in the box between uses.We did not use the country cards; they're well made but it seems odd to arbitrarily choose a couple dozen countries, out of the hundreds on earth, to include. It would seem to make more sense to have separate sets by continent, or something along those lines. Since this set is about the USA, I think it good that US territories are included, even though we did not need them.

These are wonderful cards! Very sturdy, colorful and helpful. On one side you have the state and on the other side you have the capital - therefore, you can quiz yourself both ways. I love that on the state side, there is a picture of the entire U.S., with the state on the card shaded so you can familiarize yourself with where the state is within the country. As an added bonus, there are several countries and their capitals included in the pack! My only complaint (and this is very small) is that the cards are larger than I would like -- they aren't huge, but I wish they were more like playing card size for portability purposes.

Perfect way for 9 year old. She got an A on her test.

The media could not be loaded. I like how it shows you where the state is on the front and the capital on the back, along with so many other capitals around the world. The cards are made well for their value and are simple. I like how they include possible activities to do with your little one