Matching Activities

     Matching activities are fun and important for children development.  They are good to develop fine motor skills and help children to learn about early problem solving.  Matching activities are also good for improving children cognitive skills as they help training their visual memory and increasing short-term memory.  Activities like letter-picture matching help children to find out the connection between the pictures and letters for what they stand for.  Additionally, matching activities give a space for critical thinking as children try to think and understand the connection between objects.

     Children like matching games such as matching shapes, patterns, pictures, words, letters and numbers.  Matching games are easy and enjoyable for children to enjoy and play.  They help children to identify similarities, differences, relationships and patterns.  When children try to grab the pencil and match or pick up some objects, this helps to strengthen their hand muscles and improve fine motor skills, too. 

     Do you think there is one kind of matching games?  Of course no.  Actually, there are many different kinds and choices of matching games.  Some of matching games focus on matching letters, numbers, colors, shapes and patterns.  While others are memory games such as "flipping cards" as children try to remember and match pairs.  Puzzle games can be considered as matching games and they can develop fine motor skills as children try to cut and order the pieces in their correct order. 

     Watch the following video to see how matching activities are enjoyable.

Finally, it is a good idea to play with your children some matching games to promote their cognetive development and increase concentation and learning areas.