Matching pictures for toddlers

Picture-to-Picture Matching for Montessori Toddlers

Picture-to-picture matching for Montessori toddlers is the last big category in the series of matching work for toddlers. I've noticed that this type of matching is what a lot of people try to jump to right away with toddlers. For that reason, it's pretty easy to find cards that can be used for this type of matching work all over the internet.

It's also attractive because it doesn't require any objects, only simple matching cards. But, just because it is easy to prepare doesn't mean all young toddlers are ready for this.

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Why Try Picture to Picture Matching?

Like the other types of matching this work, this is a pre-reading skill that toddlers need. It helps toddlers learn to visually discriminate between objects, this time in a completely abstract way. There is no way to touch and feel the difference like with the other types of matching. This must be done entirely by sight. And, this really isn't an easy skill, if the child isn't ready and hasn't had the proper foundation.

Nora (at 21-months-old) is not ready for this type of work. At all. I don't rush her nor do I feel any real need for her to be doing this type of work at this point. So, in these pictures, I've used some older toddlers, from my co-op. This guy is 33 months, and happily and successfully completed this work on his own -- repeating it several times. (In these updated pictures Teddy is just starting this work at 27-months-old with a limited number of cards)

To present this work, I simply have a set of identical cards in a divided tray. These particular cards are from Maitri Learning, but any simple flash cards or images will work. I try to use images without text but that's not always possible.

I start by laying one set out and then grabbing one of the pictures from the other pile. Moving left to right, I slowly place the card next to the cards that are placed on the table until I find the match. I repeat until all the matches are gone. Then, the toddler repeats. The toddler may move just how you did, or they may find their own groove. I let the exploration happen! Try not to direct the matching by naming the objects or pictures. As always, its process over product.

Once toddlers have mastered picture-to-picture matching, there are so many great extensions that can be done with this work. You can use one image cut in half to match, you can match an image to its silhouette, invert colors, or play memory. All of these are great ways to increase those abstract visualization skills that are so important for reading one day!

I hope you enjoyed this series on toddler matching and have a better idea about the order that matching work can be presented in. This is something that you can truly customize to your child's interests and can easily be put together!

What type of matching does your child enjoy? Have you tried picture-to-picture matching?

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A lesson plan for toddlers: matching objects

Matching one object to another is a complex task, and gets especially tricky when you’re matching something more abstract, like a picture, a color, or a sound. Matching is an essential skill, helping to improve a number of cognitive abilities like visual memory, short term memory, and pattern recognition. Matching also helps with focus: it’s no accident that the classic game of memory, played with pairs of cards arranged face-down, is sometimes called “concentration.”

The foundation for matching develops early, as babies start to recognize distinct features, characteristics, and properties. At around 4 months, your baby learns that specific objects make specific sounds. At 5-6 months, they can distinguish between different vocal tones and start to recognize familiar objects, sounds, and people. Between 6 and 8 months, they can usually look around to find a person who has been named (“where’s Grandma?”), and a few months later they start to recognize people beyond the immediate family.

Color recognition

Starting at around 12 months, children are beginning to understand color and may be able to recognize it. They can’t yet identify different colors or say their names, but children of this age begin to show preference for one color over another. Describe things with color: “that car is green,” “that dog is brown.” Children are starting to know that similar colors match, and contrasting ones don’t.

Basic matching

At around 15 months, your toddler may start to truly match in a basic way—in other words, they can identify things that are exactly the same as being different from things that aren’t. If you put out four balls—two that are distinctly large and of equal size, and two that are much smaller—your toddler may be able to select the two small balls intentionally, though may take some prompting.

Matching animals to their sounds

In photo: Montessori Animal Match from The Companion Play Kit

At 18 months, toddlers start matching animals to the sounds they make. Try asking “what does a cow say?” or, if your toddler knows the word cow, make the sound and have them identify the animal.

Picture matching

Starting at 19 months and continuing well into their 2s, your toddler will begin to learn about picture matching. Try laying out cards with matching pairs (animals, faces, flowers). Remember that pictures and drawings are still abstractions: they are two-dimensional representations of something real.

Matching animal sounds to pictures

Between 22 and 24 months, your toddler may start matching sounds to a picture of an animal. This is a big developmental leap: they are using different senses and connecting them in new ways. Lay out pictures of animals, make the corresponding sounds, and ask your toddler to point to the animal that makes each sound.

Matching pictures together

At around 27 months, children can start matching pictures together, which means they will soon be able to play matching games like “memory.”

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contrasting black-and-white and color cards for the development of the vision of infants 1-2 and 3-4 months, as well as the Montessori method

It has long been proven that it is never too early to engage in the development and upbringing of a child.

However, it is often forgotten that methods for this should be chosen not only interesting, but also accessible to the baby.

The black and white cards are one of these benefits.

Why do babies need black-and-white images to develop their vision?

The vision of a newborn baby has several very important features:

It is black and white up to 2-3 months. The ciliary body and retina are still poorly developed. The structure is dominated by rods - special retinal cells that allow you to see only contrasting black and white objects.
Does not perceive complex objects. Only about 15% of neural connections are formed in the brain at the time of birth. He is unable to process large amounts of information.
Cannot concentrate in one place for a long time. In the first days of life, the child's gaze is chaotic, he is not able to focus on individual objects, he sees distant objects very indistinctly.

However, it is known that more than 80% of information about the world around a person receives through vision . So, for the full and comprehensive development of the baby, it is necessary to use visual perception as early as possible. It is important to stimulate the child's brain with many vivid impressions in ways available to him.

Using contrasting black and white pictures that he can already see is one such way.

They teach the child to concentrate their eyes and attention.
They give him the very first and clearest ideas about the world around him.
Stimulates brain activity.

How do I use contrasting black and white cards?

When choosing educational pictures, you need to take into account the age of the child.

Start with the simplest images - geometric shapes, simple repeating patterns, large schematic objects.

Gradually, the complexity and detail of the images should increase.

Pictures with emoticons expressing a variety of emotions, as well as silhouettes of animals, fruits, vegetables and more elaborate patterns are introduced into the working set.

0-1 month old

Newborn babies respond positively to images that do not contain too much detail. They like smooth lines and large patterns, as well as simple geometric shapes. Find out how the baby develops during this period from the article: Proper development of a child at 1 month.

Exercises for training:

To get started, just bring the picture to the baby and teach him to concentrate on it. Over time, the exercises will become more difficult, but this is enough for a start.

Important! When using the cards, make sure that they are 20-25 cm from the baby's eyes (approximate distance from the mother's face during feeding).

1-3 months

At this age, the field of vision is still very limited, children only react to things that are within 20 degrees on the sides or 10 degrees above or below. What the baby can do during this period, read in the article: Child development at 2 months.

Exercises for training:

Show the baby a simple picture, make sure that he is not distracted by anything. After that, smoothly take the picture in one direction, then in the other. Let your baby's eyes follow you. Then try zooming in and out again on the sheet with the picture.
At the age of 3 months, the child is already able to freely focus his eyes on objects that are at a distance of up to 80 cm from him. Repeat the previous exercise, but add to it also the movement of the arm along wave-like paths and diagonally.

3-4 months

At the age of three months, the child begins to perceive drawings with curved and arched lines. It is necessary to change the pictures every 2 weeks so that he does not have time to get too used to them and learns to concentrate on new details.

Exercises to practice:

Show the picture to the child. After making sure that he is focused on it, cover half of it with a sheet of paper. After a while, open the picture completely. Then repeat your steps a few more times and watch the reaction of the child.

Stack several pictures and blank sheets of the same size, alternating them one by one. Pick up the top picture and move it to the end of the deck, giving your child some time to concentrate on the new picture. Repeat the process until all images are repeated several times. At this age, you can already introduce color.

4-6 months

At four months, the child is already able to distinguish colors, he can focus not only on near, but also on distant things, gradually learns to combine what he sees with his right and left eyes into a single whole. At this age, children especially like to look at patterns or ornaments.

Exercises for practice:

Take a picture and a piece of paper that can cover it. Give your child some time to focus on the illustration. Then take a white sheet in your other hand and draw a picture under it so that the child sees how it comes out from the opposite side of the sheet of paper. This simple exercise will help him develop spatial thinking.
Show your child two identical drawings at the same time, let him look from the first image to the next.
Take a small mirror and place it next to the picture. Gently bring the illustration to him so that the child can see its reflection. Then zoom out and zoom in again.

Don't overdo your workouts. Before them, it is advisable to make sure that your child is well-rested, full and in a good mood. Experts recommend exercising immediately after feeding.

Where to hang?

Such pictures can be hung in absolutely any place accessible to the child's eyes: on walls and doors, a refrigerator, a crib.

Often simple black and white images are used in the design of educational mats, mobiles, cubes, books and pillows.

Many of the above can be glued or sewn together by printing suitable pictures from the Internet or by simply drawing them by hand.

Download black and white and color pictures

Download pictures for printing cubes

Download black and white pictures for newborns

Ornaments that change the background

Black and white ornaments

Animals, birds, cats, butterflies

Black-white-red pictures

Images for printouts

1-2 months

3-4 months

9000

Montessori Pictures

A set of 62 black and white images can be downloaded from this site.

Color cards

There are a few important things to keep in mind when starting to practice with color pictures:

the number of colors and the complexity of the image should gradually increase in complexity;
babies first begin to see red and yellow colors (at 3-4 months). A little later, you can add pictures with blue and green to the collection.

The best way to switch to color images is to make color copies of familiar black and white pictures. First the monochrome version is shown to the baby. Then - the same image, but with the addition of color. Do not rush, it is important to give the child the opportunity to carefully consider both options and fix the difference for themselves.

Later, black and white images are completely replaced by color images. At this stage, complex ornaments (for example, all kinds of folk paintings) are very effective and interesting to the child.

Tip! Cards used for activities with a 4-6 month old baby should be pasted over with transparent tape, as he will probably put them in his mouth.

Useful video

We also recommend watching a video on this topic. You can learn more about her in Sarah Brewer's book "Super-child" and articles by Cecile Lupan. These teachers improved the methodology in many ways and made it more modern.

1300+ Free Educational Cards for Kids with Realistic Pictures

Huge database of educational pictures for kids available in PDF format.

or create with your own hands, using cards designer

Recently created development cards for preschoolers

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The most popular sets of developing cards for children

opposites of 74 cards

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9005 popular flashcard languages

How to create flashcards online?

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What types of cards can I download?

Each set of educational picture cards contains:

- large flash cards - one card per sheet for printing in A4, A5, A6, 28*28
- small flash cards - 6 and 8 cards each on A4 sheet, which are good for games like memory, bingo, lotto, etc.

Sets of cards with words grouped by 3, 4, 6, 8 cards on A4 sheet.

Both small and large learning cards can be printed, cut and laminated (laminated versions look better and last longer).

PDF files open in your browser using Adobe Acrobat Reader or another PDF reader. Most computers already have this installed, but if not, you can download it here for free.

You can also watch a slideshow of our ready-made cards online. To do this, simply click on any card icon on the page of your chosen category, and a full-screen mode will open for scrolling through the images.

If you like any of our ready-made sets (for example, among educational pictures in Russian or English), but you can't find it in the language you are interested in, then you can translate it yourself by clicking the "Create in my language" button - it will take no more than 3 minutes.

Our printed materials can be very useful for children who are learning to speak or read both in their native language and in a foreign language. They can also be a good resource for non-verbal children who are working on expressing their thoughts to parents or caregivers.

Watch flashcards online

Who benefits from using learning flashcards?

Educational pictures are useful for all age groups.

Toddlers

0 - 3 years old

Development based on the educational methods of Makoto Shichida, Heguru and Glenn Doman, contributing to increased activity of the right hemisphere of the brain and the rapid growth of the intellectual abilities of the child.

Children

> 2 years old

Games and learning of foreign languages using educational pictures and various activities: memory, bullying, identification and TPR (full physical response).

Adolescents and adults

> 13 years old

Expanding foreign or professional vocabulary using flashcards. Spaced repetition helps language learners memorize new words quickly and efficiently.

Why do we need educational pictures?

Greater Success

Nobel Laureate James Heckman has demonstrated the economic benefits of investing and developing skills early in making our children more successful and productive.

Better learning

Eric Kandel, Nobel laureate, proved that spaced repetition improves learning. Using flash cards, we improve attention and speed up the memorization of information, avoiding cognitive overload.

Tips for using educational pictures with young children

Start with a small number of cards

Start with 5-10 cards and slowly increase the number. If your child has lost interest, it's best to stop and continue another time. It is better to review in short and frequent sessions than in long and infrequent ones.

Make sure your child is in a good mood

Do not try to teach a tired and cranky child - it will disappoint both of you.

Eliminate distractions

Put away toys and turn off the TV and any other devices so you can both focus on your task.

Support your child

Praise more, and the child will feel your enthusiasm and respond positively.

Download flash cards for printing

Advantages of educational cards

What are the advantages of educational cards?

Education can start from birth;

Easy enough to do, no need to involve specialists;

Development of photographic memory, speed reading and mathematics;

Picture cards help diversify monotonous memorization;

Multisensory stimulation and intensive development of the right hemisphere of the brain;

Cards allow you to take classes wherever and whenever you want.