My kids and I had a blast playing memory with this homemade memory game that we made with pictures of some of our favorite memories of 2012.  As you will see both my kids played ( although they aren’t ready to play against each other yet – their gap in abilities is still too vast) and both loved not only beating mom ( I am terrible at this game) but also retelling stories about each picture and the memory that went with it. Oh and it’s so easy to make.

1. Gather your materials. You will need some card stock, double stick tape, digital photos , scissors and marker.
2. Choose 6 or more photos of favorite memories of 2012. You can print them out in a collage using a service like picmonkey.com or individually. Make sure you have 2 copies of each picture.
3. Cut your pictures out. Mine are all black and white because I ran out of color ink not for any grand reason.
4. Tape to the card stock.
5. Cut out.
6. I added the year on the back for fun. Also I plan on making this year after year.
7. Time to play. First up was my wee one. I laid out 8 matches for her although I probably could have done 6.
8. She loved seeing the photos of herself – her first day of school with her teacher was her favorite.  The excitement was genuine when she made a match. She made six before she asked if she could play with her tea set Next time I will keep the number of cards lower.
9. Then we set it up for my 6 year old. He got the whole deck and was eager to show off.  He didn’t know what photos I chose for the game and was happy to recount the stories that went with many of the photos.   His favorite was a photo of him playing with our contributing writer Kim’s son . He made matches so quickly and counted them up after each one. It was a perfect opportunity to skip count by two as well.

Happy New Year!