Flip-and-Find Pairs

The classic face-down matching game (Pairs, Pelmanism, Concentration), played with a small set of cards so that your child wins by remembering where things are rather than by luck.

  1. Choose 6 pairs (12 cards) to begin — a shop-bought memory game, pairs pulled from a pack of playing cards, or home-made pairs drawn on index cards.
  2. Lay them face down in a tidy grid — three rows of four. A grid makes positions easier to remember than a scatter.
  3. Take turns flipping two cards. Each player says aloud what they turned over (“a duck… and a boat”) and leaves them face up for a slow count of three so everyone can look.
  4. A match? Keep the pair and have another go. No match? Turn them back over in exactly the same places.
  5. Model your thinking out loud on your turns: “I remember a duck was up in that corner… let me try there.”
  6. Play until the cards are gone. Count pairs together, or skip the scoring and play as one team against the clock.
  7. Add two more pairs next time if 6 pairs felt easy.

Variation: make your own pairs from odd socks, two halves of cut-up picture postcards, or family photos printed twice. Play solo as “beat your own number of turns”. For a harder game, match related things (cup and saucer, sock and shoe) instead of identical ones.

Requirements

  • Space: A table or clear patch of floor about 60 x 60 cm
  • Surface: Flat and smooth so cards lie still and can be flipped easily
  • Materials: 6–10 pairs of matching cards (memory game, playing cards, or home-made); cards must look identical from the back
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child; works with up to 4 players or as a solo game
  • Supervision: Light — the adult is a fellow player

Rationale & Objective

Memory matching games are the working-memory activity most often recommended for this age: the Harvard Center on the Developing Child’s activity guide lists matching and card games in which players must track where cards are as practice for holding and updating information. Every turn asks the child to keep several picture-and-place bindings active, update them as new cards are revealed, and use them to plan the next flip — the “updating” function that Miyake and Friedman (2012) describe as constantly monitoring and revising what is held in working memory. The game draws on the visuospatial side of working memory (Alloway, Gathercole & Pickering, 2006), and it is one of the few memory tasks on which young children come close to adult performance, which is part of why they love it (Schumann-Hengsteler, 1996). Saying each card aloud and pausing before turning it back are deliberate supports: they give time to encode the position and add a verbal label alongside the visual one, in line with Gathercole and Alloway’s (2008) advice to pair memory demands with strategies. Thorell and colleagues (2009) found that preschoolers who practised computerised visuospatial working-memory games improved on untrained working-memory tasks, though effects of this kind are generally narrow (Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2013). Honest framing — a great family game that gives real practice; not a route to a higher IQ.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: flips cards at random, often turning over the same non-matching card repeatedly; matches come mostly by luck; forgets a card seen one turn ago
  • Developing: remembers the most recently seen cards and uses them on the next turn; begins flipping an unknown card first and then going to its remembered partner
  • Proficient: tracks several positions across other players’ turns with 6–8 pairs; watches closely when it is not their turn; names where a card is before flipping it
  • Advanced: plays 10 or more pairs with few wasted turns, uses deliberate strategies (rows, corners, saying positions aloud), and can win fairly against an adult who is really trying

Safety Notes

  • Small or thin cards can be mouthed or creased by toddlers — keep younger siblings supplied with their own chunky set
  • Emotional safety is the main issue — losing a memory game feels personal to a five-year-old; play cooperatively (one shared pile) if scores cause tears
  • Do not secretly throw every game; children notice. Instead level the field with fewer pairs, or give yourself a handicap (you must find pairs with your eyes closed for the count)
  • Keep sessions to one or two rounds; attention and memory both fade quickly, and a tired child flipping randomly is not practising anything

Hints

  • Playfulness: make pairs your child cares about — dinosaurs, family faces, their own drawings cut in two — and add sound effects when a pair is found
  • Sustain interest: rotate card sets, play as a team against a sand timer, or play “detective” where you ask “where do you think the cat is hiding?” before a flip
  • Common mistake: starting with the full 30–40 card set from the box. That is too many bindings to track at five and the game turns into guessing. Start with 12 cards and grow
  • No equipment: hide six pairs of small objects under upturned cups or yoghurt pots, or pair up odd socks under tea towels
  • Cross-domain: naming cards builds vocabulary; pairs of numerals and dot patterns, or upper- and lower-case letters, fold in early maths and literacy; turn-taking and losing gracefully are social-emotional practice
  • Progression: 4 pairs face up then turned over → 6 pairs in a grid → 8 pairs → 10 pairs → scattered layout instead of a grid → matching related rather than identical pictures → cards swapped to new positions mid-game

Sources

  • Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2014). Enhancing and Practicing Executive Function Skills with Children from Infancy to Adolescence — matching and card games for ages 3–5 and 5–7
  • Miyake, A. & Friedman, N. P. (2012). “The nature and organization of individual differences in executive functions: Four general conclusions.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(1), 8–14
  • Schumann-Hengsteler, R. (1996). “Children’s and adults’ visuospatial memory: The game Concentration.” Journal of Genetic Psychology, 157(1), 77–92
  • Thorell, L. B., Lindqvist, S., Bergman Nutley, S., Bohlin, G. & Klingberg, T. (2009). “Training and transfer effects of executive functions in preschool children.” Developmental Science, 12(1), 106–113
  • Alloway, T. P., Gathercole, S. E. & Pickering, S. J. (2006). “Verbal and visuospatial short-term and working memory in children: Are they separable?” Child Development, 77(6), 1698–1716
  • Gathercole, S. E. & Alloway, T. P. (2008). Working Memory and Learning: A Practical Guide for Teachers. Sage
  • Melby-Lervåg, M. & Hulme, C. (2013). “Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review.” Developmental Psychology, 49(2), 270–291