Concentration

The favorite matching game can be tailored to practice a variety of skills.

You'll Need

  • Construction paper or index cards
  • Magazines
  • Scissors
  • Glue
  • Paintbrush
  • Colored markers or crayons

Learning Stages

With your child, make your own version of the classic game of Concentration to play together. You can vary the difficulty based on your selection of words and pictures.

  1. Cut construction paper or index cards into 20 2" x 3" rectangles.
  2. Look through magazines with your child and find 10 pictures of objects that have names your child can read.
  3. Cut out and glue the pictures onto the cards.
  4. On the other 10 blank cards, write the corresponding names of the pictures.

To play the game:

  1. Place the cards facedown into rows.
  2. The first player turns over two cards. If the cards match, he collects them. If they do not a match, the cards are turned back over and the next player takes a turn.
  3. Play continues until all the cards have been collected. The player with the most pairs wins.

You can develop many different variations of this game using opposites, pairs of related objects (horse and saddle, dog and doghouse) or even foreign language words.