With billions of students stuck at home because of school closure across states and countries, many moms are now looking for more homeschooling resources.
We know the best way for young children to learn is through play!
Therefore, these animal matching cards will help your children learn more about animals in a fun way!
The Animal Matching Cards will teach your children how the animals look like and learn their names in both English and Mandarin!
Related posts:
80+ Screen Free Activities For Kids (With Free Printable Doodle Pages)
Free Printable Happy Family Coloring Pages
Fun And Colorful Easter Bingo Cards (Free!)
Free Printable Bilingual Animal Matching Cards And Memory Game
Pin me to your kids’ activities boards!
This set of printable animal matching cards includes realistic animal images that go along with the Montessori method of education where children are encouraged to learn through life-like images instead of overly stylized or cartoonish ones.
How to play the Animal Matching Game:
- Print out the Animal Matching Cards. Sign up to download them here.
- Laminate the animal matching cards for long-lasting play! Cut out the animal images and the animal names separately.
- Show one image of an animal and the matching name at the same time and read out the name to your child. Encourage your child to repeat after you. For older children, ages 5 and above, you can get your child to spell out the animal names.
- After going through all the animals and their respective names, shuffle the cards and separate them into two piles — one pile with just the animal images and the other pile with just the animal names.
- Get your child to pick one animal image and find the matching animal name from the pile!
To help my fellow Mandarin-speaking readers, I have also included the animal names in Chinese characters!
This will help children to learn the names of animals in Chinese and to be effectively bilingual.
Other than using these helping your child learn how to match the animal images to the animal names, let’s work on improving their memory skills as well!
How to play the Animal Memory Game:
- Print out two copies of the Animal Memory Game cards. Sign up to download them here.
- Laminate the print outs for longer-lasting play! Cut out the individual animal images. There are 20 different animal images so you will have a total of 40 animal game cards.
- Shuffle all the 40 animal game cards and put them on the table or the playmat face-down. Arrange the game cards in an 8 by 5 table arrangement. In other words, place 8 animal game cards neatly next to each other in one row with some space in between. Then place 4 more cards neatly below each of these 8 cards with some space in between the cards. That will give you 5 rows and 8 columns for the 40 game cards.
- Each player takes a turn to flip over two game cards of their choice. If the animals on the game cards do not match, the cards and flipped over again, face-down, and remain in their position.
- If the animals on the chosen game cards are identical, the player gets to remove these two game cards and keep them. This player also gets to go for another turn immediately to flip over two more game cards.
- This continues until all the game cards in play have been matched. The player with the most number of pairs of animals wins the game!
The Animal Memory Game encourages your child to focus fully on the game and exercise their brain muscles because they need to memorize the positions of the different animal images so that they can flip over identical pairs when it is their turn.
For younger children, you can start with just 10 game cards (5 pairs of animals) in play for them to get the hang of the game.
Increase the number of pairs of animals in the gameplay for a bigger challenge!
The Animal Memory Game is a wonderful screen-free quiet time play for children when busy moms have to do their chores or work from home.
For one-player games, you can even encourage your child to set a timer to record how long they take to match all the animal game cards. Kids who love a good challenge will keep repeating this game to break their own record for the fastest time to complete the game!
Get the Bilingual Animal Matching Cards And Memory Game below!
Sign up to download the Animal Matching Cards here!
Let me know in the comments below what other activities your kids will enjoy and I will try my best to create them for you!
You will also be interested in:
12 comments
This is an awesome printable for my toddle! He loves animals and needs to continue doing educational activities now that he is home. Thank you for this!
You’re most welcome! I’m so glad to be able to help moms find ways to entertain and educate their kids with free printable activities, especially in a challenging time like this. Take care!
Such a cute printable. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks so much for checking it out!
Fun and educational. It is so important to introduce other languages at a young age. Thanks for sharing!
Yes, that is so true! It is much easier for children to learn multiple languages at a young age because they absorb information like a sponge! I sure hope your kids will have fun with these animal matching cars and memory game!
I like the quality of the cards. They are so clear and bright pictures. Easy and fun to learn.
Thank you so much, Sonia!
This printable is perfect! I’m always looking for something else to keep my daughter busy these days!
Yay! So Glad to know that you find these animal matching cards useful! I hope your daughter will enjoy playing and learning with them!
This is so cool! I teach with VIPKid and I’ve been thinking about having my sons take Chinese when they’re old enough. These would be so great for them!
Oh, that’s so cool! I’m so happy to know that you find these bilingual matching cards useful!