Smart Choices Image Cards

Welcome to Smart Choices

Definition of Success: Prepare your child by developing critical thinking and problem solving to help them make smart choices when you are not there.

Smart Choices is a well thought out deck of 84 Image Cards that focuses on IMAGES that will help parents/teachers/educators teach children to recognize danger and to make smart choices ahead of time. Smart Choices will aid in having a plan for the whole family so you AND your child will know what to do when presented with some difficult decisions.

There’s a reason your child’s storybooks are filled with colorful pictures and images. Visuals are proven to help increase learning retention for kids, adds context and makes it easier for kids to follow along and interpret the context of your conversations.

According to Dr. Lynell Burmark, education consultant who writes and speaks about visual literacy: “…unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information (plus or minus 2) […]. Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched.”

Smart Choices Image Cards was designed to focus on your child processing primarily in pictures rather than words, so ideas are interconnected, and your child can see the relationship between elements (verbal discussion plus visual learning) in the whole.

Here are just a few advantages of this style of IMAGE BASED learning:

Pictures appeal to curious young minds
Respond to visual information FASTER
Most effective way to make sure your conversations get stored as a long-term memory
Communication between you and your child can be quicker and even deeper
Grasps concepts easily by stimulating imagination
Smart Choices Image Cards will help your child CONNECT your previous conversations and our images with REAL LIFE situations. We are working as a team to set them up for success, find the SMART CHOICE "file" that relates to the situation, act on it and get home safely.

https://www.beforeyou.com/blog/why-images-illustrations-are-important-to-kids/
https://graphicmama.com/blog/visuals-kids-learning-education/
https://elearningindustry.com/visual-learning-6-reasons-visuals-powerful-aspect-elearning

The powerful images on the front of these cards plus the "helpful hints" on the back provoke incredibly important two-way conversations with our children, our grandchildren, our students, and our small groups around potentially dangerous situations and how to maneuver around them. Having already talked though the dangers that each card elicits puts our kids in a position of preparedness, where they can draw on knowledge from a past experience, or in this case, a past card conversation. They know what to do!

Smart Choices supply 84 two-sided Image Cards:

Smart Choices is not about dumping knowledge into your child’s brain; it is about carrying on a conversation with them. WE SUPPLY THE IMAGE AND YOU SUPPLY THE SUBJECT MATTER, with plenty of "helpful hints" from us.
On the front will be an image that your child will see.
On the back will be a few "Helpful Hints" to help parents through their first discussions. These are just "hints" because the conversations with your children will most likely be through YOUR imagination, research and experiences.

ANYONE can get involved!

Parents/Guardians/Family
Homeschooling
Clubs/Groups
Teachers/Educators/Tutors
Special needs teaching "Outside the box" for children and adults with learning disabilities
Counselors
Martial Arts Instructors/Coaches
You name it!

Parents/guardians know their children best and "how to speak their child's language". Each parent has their own rules and teaching style so we are focusing on setting you up for success to help your child learn while you supply the "meat and potatoes" for each image.

Smart Choices is dedicated to my parents Thomas Oscar Henry Luehder and Marla Ann Smith Luehder.