Business Cards Matching Game

Activity Overview

Let’s create our own matching game together! Matching games help children develop visual memory, which is important in identifying patterns, making relationships between objects, and helping young learners find ways to categorize using similarities and differences. These skills are all a part of what we call visual discrimination. Building up visual descrimination in young children helps them quickly identify and sort objects and enables students to become more engaged in the environment around them. The research aspect of this activity is a building block for the research students will do as they grow through school. While the adults will be providing resources today, the practice of finding pertinent information in those resources is the first step towards understanding how students can approach new topics.

What You Need

• Two pieces of paper

• Markers, colored pencils, or crayons

• Scissors

• Clothesline Clues to Jobs People Do by Katherine Heling and Deborah Hembrook

• When I Grow Up by Michele Fry, Simone Van der Spuy & Jennifer Jacobs

• Careers by Mary Berendes

Steps

1. Take one sheet of paper and fold it in half. Then fold the half into thirds. When you unfold the paper, you’ll have six equally-sized boxes. These will be the cards for the matching game. Repeat for the other piece of paper and set aside for now.

2. Revisit the activities Jobs People Do and City Jobs from previous weeks. Remember that different professions need different tools to do their job.

3. Revist Clothesline Clues to Jobs People Do, When I Grow Up, and Careers, and choose six interesting jobs and six corresponding tools that they need to do their job (for example, a veterinarian needs a stethoscope, a lifeguard needs a megaphone).

4. Take one of the folded papers and draw a job in a box (you may draw an image that represents the job - for example, a mailbox for a mail carrier or a planet for an astronaut - or the adult may write the word and help the student identify it). In another box, draw a tool that you identify with the job. Repeat with the other jobs and tools until both sheets of paper are complete. You should have six jobs and six tools when finished.

5. Cut out each of the boxes to create cards for each job and tool. Turn the cards upside down and mix them up. Taking turns, flip the cards over and practice matching each job to the corresponding tool.

Guiding Questions

• What jobs do you find interesting? What jobs do you want to know more about?

• What tools does a person doing this job need?

• What do you notice about this job?

• Which person’s job matches up with which tool?

Extensions

• For more of a challenge, pick more jobs from the read alouds and fold more paper into job cards.

• Think of jobs you know that are not represented in the books - perhaps those of friends or family members - and create new job cards.