homemade matching game Archives

Matching is HUGE in our house right now. Coordinating is simply not good enough for Miss G anymore. Everything. must. match. To the point where she will pick a treat (organic fruit leather) with a blue package while grocery shopping because she is wearing blue pants, cutting her carrots requires an orange knife, and wearing white socks isn’t happening if there is no other white in the outfit. So when I came across an empty egg carton during my usual nap time house cleaning, I decided to use it to put together a little matching game rather than recycling it.

I had everything else I needed on hand… Acrylic paints in primary colours, plus white and black, a paintbrush, an old rag, and some water.

I simply painted each egg spot by swirling the paint up from the base to the top edge.

I made sure to include the basic rainbow colours, plus black, white, and grey, and of course aqua because, well… it’s the best colour ever.

Afterwards, I gave the inside of the lid a quick coat of white paint.

Now if I’m being honest, Gracen awoke from her nap before the paint was fully dry and she was so excited to play her new game that we took it to the bathroom and used the blowdryer on it.

When it was fully dry, I poured a bunch of buttons in the lid, removed the clear ones, and asked, “Do you want to play?”

With a prompt “Yes!” and zero direction, she got busy matching the buttons to the colours painted in the cups.

Grae loves playing and the nice thing about this little game is that when she’s finished, she just closes it up and everything is contained and ready for next time.

♥

After nap time today, Grae actually came up to me and said, “Do fun ac-ti-vi-tee?” Funny little duck. Yes, baby girl, we can always do a fun ac-ti-vi-tee. In fact, that’s why I’m constantly adding to my Toddler Activities Pinterest board. For moments just like these.

I love the idea behind this simple sun bleached puzzle, but because the sun wasn’t shining all that much in our neck of the woods today (and because it takes a couple days time to create), we decided to make our own ready-in-an-instant version, sans the sun. ☺

First up, Gracen helped me collect our materials… A piece of large black card stock, a silver sharpie (a white/yellow/silver/gold crayon or pencil crayon would work too), and an assortment of flatish objects from around the house.

Next, we traced the objects onto the card stock. Grae helped with tracing a couple of the objects, but for the most part, she was very content with watching me trace and announcing the names of the objects and the shapes they left on the paper.

Here’s what our household objects puzzle looked like when we’d traced all of the objects.

Miss G got busy matching right away. I swear she lives for stuff like this. In between shape and object names, she kept repeating “Fun game. Mama (and) Grae Grae make FUN game”.