Foster a love of words in your little cupid this Valentine's Day with this lovey-dovey activity. Your child will create a memory game that doubles as an early reading activity. Before you know it your kid will have mastered a few sight words, and a few that she can use to show her love for friends and family.
What You Do:
- Working with the ruler and foam board, measure out an even number of tiles. A tile that is 2” by 3” will work well.
- Once you have marked them with the pencil, take over and carefully cut out with a box knife or craft knife. Draw the blade very slowly toward you so that you can make a straight cut. Scissors crush the edges of the foam board so a knife works much better.
- On one side of each tile, write your memory word. You can use a combination of early sight words and Valentine’s Day words.
- All, Am, Be, I, My, Please, Red, See, Two, Want, Who, Yes, You
- Hugs, Kiss, Mine, Love, Sweet
- Once you have written the words, have your young readers help you decorate the backs of each tile. You can use red paper, paint or stickers. Make certain that they're decorating the backs of all of the cards with more or less the same design; you don't want it to be too easy to identify the cards.
- Once the tiles are dry, you're ready to play! Have your young reader turn all of the tiles face down and then mix them up. You can play with the tiles in a jumble or in neat rows.
- Decide who goes first and have that player flip over two tiles. If the tiles match, the player gets to collect those tiles. If the tiles don’t match, the player must flip them back over so the words are once again face down. Then, it's the next player's turn.
- Continue to play until all the pairs have been collected.
- Whoever has collected the most tiles by the end of the game is the winner!
Add a twist: Once a player finds two matching cards, he has to correctly read the words to collect the pair.