Alphabet and Art Matching Game

My five year old is heading to Kindergarten soon (yikes) and I wanted to make a game to help her to match uppercase and lowercase letters.  Since I'm an artist, I also wanted to give her a little bit of an art lesson and teach her the names of some of my favorite artists.  So, I combined the two ideas and made some fun cards.

First, I started with 3x5 index cards.  I drew an uppercase and lowercase letter on each card and underlined the letter.  Then I gave them to Holly to color.  She did a great job staying inside the lines.  She colored the uppercase and lowercase letter the same color to make matching easier later on.  Then I folded the cards and cut them in half.

I wanted to put the art matching game on the back, so I watered down some white school glue and pasted the index cards onto the back of some art postcards I had on hand.  You could do something similar with family photos or vacation postcards.  Anything that is the same size and would fit at least 3x5 inches on the back.  I put two letter cards onto each postcard, making sure they met on one edge so that when I cut them apart they'd make a mini puzzle.

Here's the ALPHABET side...

and here is the ART side...

You can play with them like a traditional matching game by turning over a card at a time, trying to find a matching pair... or get more creative!  I put the cards ALPHABET side up and spelled out a short word.  Holly had to find the matching lowercase letters.

We also learned a little bit about Lucien Freud, Chuck Close, Klimt, Picasso and other awesome artists... by turning the ART side face up and making the mini puzzles.

It was really fun coming up with new ways to play with the cards.  And I'm keeping them in a little pencil box I found at Staples which works perfectly!