Monday, October 24, 2011

Memory Matching Balloons

Yes, yes, another activity involving balloons! They are big time fun at our house as far as my girls are concerned, so steel yourselves for even more of them to come :-)
This game is just like a traditional matching/memory game, but using balloons instead of cards. I designed it to work for both of our girls age groups (2 and 4), to teach colour matching for Squeak and sight word matching for Bubble.
And of course, to have an excuse to run around crazy in a room full of balloons.
That too ;-)

WE USED:

* balloons of the same colour
* stickers
(we used a pack of coloured dots and a pack of large labels)
* texta/marker

optional - we use balloon clips when we play games involving balloons, they can be bought at most party/discount stores very cheaply (we paid $2 for a pack of 100 from our local dollar shop). Using balloon clips instead of tying off balloons means you can deflate them after the fun is over and reuse them again and again. Better for the budget and better for the environment too.

Inflate your balloons and either tie them off or use balloon clips to secure them. You will need enough balloons to create as many pairs as you will be using in your matching game.
We used ten balloons for Squeak's colour matching game and ten for Bubble's sight word game as well.

You will need two sets of each sticker you intend to use for your matching game since you will need 'pairs'.

For Squeak's colour matching game we put ten coloured dots on the sides of ten balloons (two of each of the five colours).

For Bubble's game I wrote her sight words (two of each word) on large label stickers and she attached them to the sides of her ten balloons.

We threw all of the balloons onto the floor, ran around to stir them up so they were jumbled and then raced to see who could find all of their pairs first.
The girls had to find two matching balloons, say the colour/word (or ask me what it was) then put them on the bed before finding their next pair. There was a lot of crawling, running, sharing and learning going on.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you very much for giving me a lot of inspiration when I visit ur websit every time!!! From this balloon activity, I am inspired to have Chinese bopomo matching game in my class!love you!

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  2. You're so welcome! What a great idea to match the characters and letters, I hope your class has a lot of fun! Thankyou for your lovely comment x

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