Match the Opposites Game

Words on Parenting Wednesday is a weekly post series on the subject of parenting. I’ll talk about any adventures we have with our girls to motherhood experiences to fun and games for children.

Do your kids love to play with puzzles? Do they love finding matches of two items? Well then, this game is for them!

Match it! Opposites is made by The Learning Journey International. This game has 30 puzzle sets of opposites. It is perfect to help teach your kids their opposites.

We bought this game for our 2.5 year old daughter, Katie, at Christmas. When Katie played this game, she was couple months past 2 years old. At that time, she wanted to stack the puzzles more than make matches. Fast forward to today (5 months later), Katie will match the opposites mostly by herself. There are several of the sets that I’ll have to help her.

How did Katie get to that stage? I took several steps to help teach her how to match the opposites. Once I showed Katie that the puzzles could be connected to each other, she was excited to try to do it. I started out by placing each match set next to each other, unconnected, so she could learn how to connect the puzzles together. After she had more practice, I was able to hand her a match and she could face the puzzles the right direction and connect the pieces together. Now she can grab the puzzles out of the box and match each opposite mostly without my help.

One thing that I want to do with Katie is play a game to find the opposite matches. I’m going to set out several matches (mixed up) at a time and have her find the matches. I will slowly increase the number of matches I have set out as she gets better at playing the game.

Would your kids love this game as much as my daughter does? What type of game(s) do your kids love to play the most?