Today we made our very own memory game! We found this great DIY Memory Game set at Tiger and at first I thought that the kids were too young to be able to draw all of those matching pictures, but we found a way to make it work.
You don't need to have a set to use, you could just some heavy card or even cardboard cut into equal sized squares. For Ivy I drew some simple shapes and let her use her markers to colour them in. We've been learning shapes, so it was good for her to use the words to identify them but also to have the freedom to colour them however she liked.
For Ethan I explained that we wanted to have 2 cards that were exactly the same. I only gave him 2 cards at a time and made sure that we talked about what he was going to draw and what colours he was going to use first. It was definitely a challenge for him to draw 2 identical pictures, he kept wanting to draw different pictures on each card, but with reminders and encouragement that he would get to play the game at the end he was convinced to follow instructions.
Once the kids had each drawn and coloured in 5 pairs I wrote each of their names on two cards so that we had a full set of 24 cards to play with, and Ethan shuffled them all around ready for us to play our memory game.
Ivy is new to playing games like this so my main focus for her is to teach her how turn taking games work and to follow instructions. She kept wanting to turn over all of the cards at once, so we kept saying 'wait' and then counting own cards to turn over '1, 2' then turning them back over. She didn't make any matches, but she did start to wait a little bit longer between turns at least!
Ethan didn't mind that at all, as he was able to match all of the pairs on his turns and end up winning the game! He was quite good at remembering that he had seen certain cards already, but sometimes forgot where he had seen them and needed a few tries to find them. He was so excited to make matches and stack them all up in front of him!
We had so much fun making our own memory cards and playing with them, we'll definitely be adding to our cards and playing again soon.
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