Matching Game: Baby Animals
Flip two cards at a time and match each baby animal to its grown-up. Every card says whether it is a Baby or an Animal, and a pair is always one of each. The game counts a mistake when you miss a match on a card you have already seen.
How to tell them apart
Both cards in a pair have a picture and a name, so a child who cannot read yet can play by looking, and the names come along with the pictures. Look for what the baby shares with its parent: the long ears of the leveret and the hare, the stripes of the kitten and the cat, the black and white patches of the calf and the cow.
Some babies look nothing like their parents. A tadpole swims with a tail and grows legs later to become a frog. A caterpillar eats leaves until it turns into a butterfly. A puggle, the baby of an echidna, is born blind and hairless, and its spines only start to grow weeks later.
How to remember the names
Link the baby’s name to its grown-up with a mental image. For the cygnet and the swan, you might picture a swan signing its name with a feather, and a little cygnet watching. The stranger the picture, the easier it is to recall. See how to create mnemonic images for more ways to build them.
To remember where each card is, give every position on the board a place in a memory palace, and walk back through the palace when you need to find a partner.
About the drawings
The animals are drawn for this site, side on and facing right, except the owls, which look straight at you. The babies are a little rounder and softer than their parents. Each baby name is used only once, even where it fits more than one animal. A joey is the young of any kangaroo or wallaby, a cub can be a bear or a lion, and a calf can be a cow, an elephant or a whale, but on this board each name goes with one grown-up.
Try a bigger board
Every game deals a different set of animals, so play again to meet new ones. Once you can clear a small board with only a few mistakes, move up a size.
Try another matching game or see all of our free memory games.
