Homemade Matching/Memory Tile Game

These tiles, which can be used upside down for a memory game, or picture side up for matching, were so simple and inexpensive to make! Here's what I did:

Months ago I bought Sesame Street stickers from the dollar store, with three matching sheets in the package. I let him stick one sheet for a random activity and he just adored them, so I've been saving the others for something like this. I've been on a spending freeze for three months now (I literally haven't bought anything new...just recycling old stuff!), but I received some birthday money this week and decided to take some of it to Hobby Lobby and browse around.

There I found the squares shown above (okay, really that's just the empty package to help you find them). They're a lot like Scrabble tiles but with a bigger surface area. They had several different sizes and shapes, but these were perfect for the stickers I planned to use. They were $1.47 per pack of eight and I bought two packs. All of the unfinished wood is currently on sale so I purchased  these and the tray shown above for $3.29! I simply stuck the stickers on and quickly had a cute, durable game for Ty!

He woke from nap very ready to use his new game! There are only eight matches so he just lay them all out at once and picked at random With a larger number of matches we tend to make a pile with one of each match and lay the other set out in lines on the table or rug.

I appreciated how he lined the matches up at the bottom after he made each to get them out of his visual field when looking for other matches. We used to model this for him and it's nice to see that he picked-up on it.

Last one!

Proud of himself and also enjoying the character pictures!