Matching games are great for learning and kids love them. Here is an easy way to make your own using the ends of your frozen juice containers.

1. Save and wash juice lid containers.
2. Print whatever you want to match (see ideas below). Color and cut.
3. Attach your items with a little contact paper (this protects like lamination and makes it easy to peel off when you want to change the games.)
4. When you’re done, a great way to store these is in an empty Pringles can!

Young Children Matching Games

1. Match colors.
2. Match pictures.
3. Match shapes.

Literacy Matching Games

1. When children are learning letters, put the capital letters on some lids, and the lower case letters on others.  They make a match when they put the correct lower case letter with the capital letter.
2. When children know their letters and are learning sounds, print out phonics pictures (a picture that starts with each letter of the alphabet). A match is made by matching the picture with the correct initial letter. (For our lids we just Googled “phonics pictures” and found lots of sites that let you download the pictures for your own use but won’t let you redistribute them)
3. When children are older, you can match whatever skill they are learning in school – rhyming words, synonyms, antonyms, or homonyms.

Math Matching Games

1. Young children can match numbers with number of objects.
2. Older children can match addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problems with the  answers.

The ideas are limited by just your imagination.  Besides learning the skill, matching is a great activity for the brain. Do you have any great matching ideas we didn’t list?

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