Good Night Animals Match Game

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Apparently we have really needed some little animal guys around our house! Skyler loves animals and we are constantly reading books about animals. Earlier in the week I shared this Big Red Barn inspired small world play, and today I am going to show you our activity interpretation of another favorite book of ours - Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann.

Skyler has been asking for this book a lot lately, and often I will walk into his room to see him reading it on his own. He even says "Good night, dear," and says good night to all of the animals, the lion being his favorite. It just melts my mama heart!

For this activity I used several animals from both the Wild and North American Wildlife Toob sets. I used the animals that could be found in the book, that Skyler knows well, or ones that can be seen at our zoo, which is why I picked a combination from the sets.

To create our match game, I took pictures of the animal figurines against a roll of white paper, printed them off and cut them out. I have always wanted to make Skyler a match game using this method and was intimidated, but it was actually quite easy!

I picked out the three animals from the story that we had - gorilla, lion, and giraffe - and set them out for Skyler. We had just read through the book, so I asked if he wanted to put his animals to sleep. He picked up the gorilla and set it down on the matching picture.

After matching the giraffe and lion and letting him play for a few minutes, I asked if he wanted more animals to match. I added three new animals for him to match.

He quickly matched his tiger, elephant, and moose, so I added three more animals.

Skyler loved the crocodile and matched it over and over! Hearing him say good night to the crocodile was adorable, so I was happy that he wanted to play with that one repeatedly :)

Skyler took a break to read his book, so I took the figurines off the pictures and reorganized them so he could try all nine at once. I only put out the nine total, even though I printed fourteen. Eventually I might give him all animals at once, but for awhile I will stick to just a few at a time.

This was a lot harder for him, but he did eventually get all of the animals sorted. The hardest for him to distinguish were the camel and moose. A very similar color and both with strange things on the tops of their bodies!

I knew Skyler would enjoy this match game, but I was a little surprised just how much he liked it, and also at how well he did at distinguishing the animals. He happily sat and sorted his animals, sometimes saying good night, always telling me what he had or what color it was. He also liked holding two animals together and saying "they huggin'!" which cracked me up!

If you have animal figurines around or if you have thought about getting some, you have to try this activity! It was so simple to put together and a lot of fun - Skyler can vouch for it! ;)