Games
Memory Matching Cards
Printable pairs cards in five flavours: matching pictures, picture to word, capital to small letter, number to dots, or your own pairs. Square cards so nothing shows face down, with backing sheets to print on the reverse.
Four steps
How to make printable memory matching cards
- 1
Choose what makes a pair
Matching pictures, picture to word, letter case, number to dots, or your own.
- 2
Set the number of pairs
Six to eight for a toddler, twelve for a young child, more for adults.
- 3
Pick a card size
36, 46 or 60 mm square. Larger cards suit smaller hands.
- 4
Add card backs
A backing sheet follows each page of faces, to print on the reverse.
- 5
Print, cut and play
Lay all cards face down, turn two at a time, keep the pairs you match.
The same game, five different lessons
A memory game is a set of pairs turned face down, and nothing says a pair has to be two identical cards. Once a pair is simply two things that belong together, the same rules teach five different things:
- Matching pictures is the classic game, and the only version that works before a child can read.
- Picture to word makes early reading the price of every match.
- Capital to small letter is harder than it sounds. A and a, R and r, G and g look nothing like each other, which is exactly the point.
- Number to dots is counting practice that does not feel like counting practice. The dots are laid out in a ten frame, so seven can be seen as five and two rather than counted one at a time.
- Your own pairs covers vocabulary, a language you are learning, times tables, capital cities, or anything else with two halves.
Why a pair is never printed twice
Ask for more pairs than a set contains and most generators quietly repeat one. That puts four identical cards on the table, and the game cannot recover from it: a child turns two, matches them, is told they are right, then finds two more that also match and no way of knowing which two ever belonged together. The deck here is capped at the number of genuinely different pairs available, and it says so on screen when it caps.
Every deck also comes out with an even number of cards and each pair present exactly twice. An odd card left over is not a cosmetic problem: it ends the game with one card that can never be matched, and the child is usually the one who gets blamed for it.
Playing it
Lay every card face down in a grid. Each player turns two. If they match, they keep them and go again; if not, they go back face down in the same places and the turn passes. The game ends when every pair is claimed and whoever has most has won.
Two variations worth knowing. For a child who is finding it hard, play with the cards face up first and simply hunt for pairs, which builds the habit of scanning the grid. For a child who is finding it too easy, add the rule that a matched pair must be named out loud before it can be kept, which is where the picture to word set earns its keep.
Related printables
Flashcards cover the same content as a drill rather than a game, alphabet tracing follows on from the letter set, and party game cards handle the games for older children and adults.
Answers