Bean just spent the morning playing with these laminate cards, and I’m now ready to rave about them.
Playing by herself, the cards pose several challenges. First, some problem solving as she lays them out so that they don’t overlap. This sounds like a simple idea, but it’s something new for a 2 year old. She has filled up all the carpet space to her right…now what? Ah, yes, move your leg and put them on your left.
Second, matching the cards to the animals requires some spacial memory, as she tries to remember exactly where she saw that koala card.
Third, and this seems very not obvious to adults, it’s actually challenging. We’re so used to seeing images of hippos and elephants, that we sometimes don’t realize that they don’t look entirely different from each other. Large, dark grey animals. She also kept mixing up a brown goat and a brown cow. It requires a lot of concentration for her to pick out the different features and correctly place the animals.
When I play with her, the matching game becomes a lesson in vocabulary as we search for and name the animals (“Hmmm, where is the koala card? Did you see the koala?”) and she also adds in little details about the animal as she pairs them. “Frog. Ribbit ribbit.” And I’ll add in some other fact. It feels like she’s exercising numerous brain muscles all at once, and it’s a wonderful thing to see.
I originally got the idea for these on How We Montessori. She took photos of her child’s toy animals and turned them into matching cards. I just found images online (Google image search for clip art) of the animals Bean had, printed them out, and then laminated them.
If you aren’t down with laminating, Michael Olaf has tons of different animal matching card sets.
