Winter Animals Shadow Matching Activity for Preschoolers
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This Winter Shadow Matching Activity will help preschoolers develop their visual discrimination further.
Visual discrimination is the ability to notice the differences and similarities between objects or symbols, as well as their shapes, textures, form, orientation, size, and colors.
Children must develop this ability or skill to be able to:
- Identify and differentiate letters and numbers.
- Learn how to read and write.
- Understand and interpretate the world around them.
- Function properly at school and at home.
- Do activities that require visual acuity such as puzzles, sorting, and mazes.
Winter Shadow Matching
This FREE Winter Shadow Matching activity looks simple, but it will help your children develop their visual discrimination. It requires very little prep time and it allows you to use it in different ways, depending on your children’s skills level.
This printable comes with three mats with 5, 4, and 3 shadow squares respectively, 12 animals shadow squares, 12 animal picture squares, 12 animal word squares, and three mats without squares.
How to Prepare the Activity
This activity must be durable and strong, because the children will manipulate them in any kind of way, and you want it to last a long time.
To get the activity ready, you only need these materials:
- FREE Animals Shadow Match printable (found at the end of this post).
- Printer.
- Scissors.
- Laminator.
- Laminator pouches.
- White cardstock.
Begin by printing all the pages using white cardstock. Then cut out and laminate the shadows, pictures, and word squares to protect them and make them last longer. That way you can store the activity in a binder or a Zip-lock bag to protect it and use it year after year.
How to Use the Activity
Depending on your children’s skills set, there are a few different ways you could use these matching activities.
- You can give your child one mat or more mats with shadow squares and the animal pictures squares to match, placing the picture squares on top of the correct shadows.
- The child can place the pictures on top of the shadows and then the squares with the animal name.
- He or she can use the mats without squares as a base to match the shadows and picture squares.
- Or the child can use the blank mats to match all the shadows, pictures and names.
If a child struggles to do any of the suggested activities, try asking him or her to only look at one image at a time, then another, and so on. As the child’s skills improve you can offer a more complex activity.
Books About Winter Animals
You know that I’m always talking about the importance of reading books to your children. That is something that you never stop doing. The benefits that reading aloud bring to your children are many. Just to mention one I will say that this activity will increase your children’s vocabulary.
There are so many good books out there, that it will be impossible to mention all of them in one post. Because of that, I want to give you just some titles you can use that are good. You can find all of these books at your local library, at a used books store, and, of course, on Amazon. To make it easier for you to add them to your collection, you just have to click on the book pictures, and it will take you directly to my affiliate links.
Pin It For Later
If you are in a rush and don’t have time to read the post and download the printable, but want to save it for later, pin it to one of your boards on Pinterest, and come back to it later.
Then check my other posts for Winter and Christmas below. They all have free printables that you can add to your collection.
I hope this is a beautiful season for you, your family, and your preschoolers, and that this activity makes your lesson planning a little easier, and helps your children develop those necessary visual discrimination skills a little further.
Be happy, safe, and creative. I wish you well.
Love,
P.S. Please let me know if this activity work for you, and if you would like to see an article or a printable about how to make something specific, please let me know and I will try my best to create it for you. My goal is to help you in any way I can and I don’t like anything better than to post something that you might find useful.
