Are You My Mother?: Printable Game

I love when my kids like books that I remember reading.  My daughter's new favorite is Are You My Mother?  Remember this one?  It's a cute story about a bird that goes looking for his mother.  He asks a kitten, a hen, and a dog if they are his mother.  He thinks a boat and a plane might be his mother. Of course, he eventually finds his mother.

Since my daughter loves this book and my son loves playing Memory, I decided to combine the two with this game.

I made cards with pictures of mother and baby animals and printed them on cardstock.  If you want to play your own game of Mama Match-Up the two pages can be found by clicking here. 

We cut them out, colored them, and matched the babies with their mamas.  Then we played Memory. (Do you know what I'm talking about?  People call it different things but it's the game where players lay the cards face down and take turns choosing two cards.  If your cards match you get to keep them. For this game a baby and mama were considered a match.  The player with the most pairs at the end wins.) 

Clearly, drawing is not one of my strengths.  Most of the animals came from How to Draw 101 Animals. I included the animals from Are You My Mother? plus some other animals.  The last two animals (the frog & butterfly) are tricky because the babies do not look like their mothers.  

I asked which animals were in the story and which were not.  We looked back at the pictures in the book if we couldn't remember.  (Using picture cues is an important early reading skill.) Referencing texts is a lifelong reading skill.  Looking back at a text to find proof is one thing most students like to skip so I am trying to encourage it early!   If Drew showed more interest in writing we would have labeled the pictures together.  If you wanted to do this and your little readers aren't into Memory, you could skip the cutting and just draw a line connecting each mama with her baby - each baby and mama are on the same page.