Starting to match

These activities are suitable for children aged 21-30 months and align with stage 4 of the Developmental Journal Babies Visual Impairment (DJVI).

Safety first

What you'll need

• Items around the home that can be paired or grouped either by type, colour or texture.
• A shape-sorter toy.

Tips

Encouraging your child to match objects can be fun and is a simple activity to do around the home. As well as learning to match, you can also use these activities to encourage your child to explore and learn about texture, colour, shape and size. 

Activity

Keep the game simple to start with, matching like for like:

• Pairing basket - put a few paired household items in a basket and encourage your child to pull the pairs out (spoons, toothbrushes, shoes, gloves).
• Fruit in a bowl - mixing fruit up on the table and then ask your child to place in pairs. This activity is great for talking about colour, texture and smell.

As your child starts to develop their skills, you can add more pairs of the same object type:

• Matching pairs of shoes. This is a good way to talk about size, colour, left and right.
• Matching socks. This can be done by size, colour, or texture.
• Pairing shapes cut out of card.
• Sorting different coloured counters into tins.

Using a shape sorter is a good way to introduce different shapes and colour, as well as matching shapes to a hole. At first, your child may need some help to match the shape with the hole and to correctly align the objects for them to fall through.