Animal Coats Matching Cards: A Montessori Animal Skin Activity

Animal Coats Matching is a Montessori sensorial activity for children from 12 months, where your child matches an animal’s coat to its photograph.

In this post: what the activity is and why it belongs in Montessori Cultural work, what changes in a child’s thinking between 12 and 18 months, why Montessori asked for real before abstract, how to extend the work with animal figurines, and where to get the printable cards.

Animal coat matching cards are a Montessori sensorial activity for children from about 12 months. Your child studies the pattern on each coat card, a leopard’s spots, a zebra’s stripes, a parrot’s feathers, and finds the photo card it belongs to.

Children are drawn to animals, and the work can run two ways. Cards alone work the eyes. Add animal figurines and it becomes multi-sensorial, because your child is matching what they feel in their hands to what they see on the card.

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Isolating a Sense vs. Combining Two

Traditional Montessori sensorial work isolates one sense at a time. The blindfold used with the Touch Tablets is the clearest example: take sight away, and the hands have to do the work alone.

Animal coat matching can run that way. It can also run the other way, with the eyes and the hands working together. Your child feels the figurine, then finds the flat card that matches it.

You can introduce this multi-sensorial version from around 18 months. The lesson also belongs in Montessori Cultural and Science work, since every coat on the cards comes from a real animal in a real part of the world.

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What Changes Between 12 and 18 Months

Piaget called the first two years the sensorimotor stage. A child understands the world by acting on it. See it, touch it, shake it, drop it, drop it again the second you pick it up.

Matching follows the same path.

At first it is direct. A child matches what looks the same: this photograph to the identical photograph. One to one, nothing abstract, nothing held in mind.

Then something shifts. Show a child a photograph of a white horse and hand them a small brown figurine. One is flat, one is three-dimensional. Different colors, different sizes, different representations. And the child understands: horse.

Not this looks exactly like that. But these are different things that stand for the same kind of thing.

That shift is small to watch and enormous underneath. It is the beginning of symbolic thought, and a word on a page is a symbol too.

It is also why Animal Coats Matching runs in three stages rather than one, and why the order matters more than the materials.

The mini course shows each stage presented, in order, with the cards ready to print.

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Why Montessori Said Real Before Abstract

Montessori’s guidance for the early years was simple: real first, abstract later.

Nothing compares to standing in front of a living elephant. When that isn’t possible, a photograph or a video of a real animal is the next best thing. Real skin, real ears, real weight.

She also cautioned against the opposite. Animals drawn unrealistically, animals that talk, pink elephants that fly. In the early years ,a child is still sorting out what is real and what is imagined, and a foundation in reality gives them something solid to sort against.

This is why the cards in Animal Coats Matching use real photographs. A leopard’s coat is already extraordinary. It doesn’t need improving.

I learned this one the hard way, with a Russian folk tale and a bear that climbed out of the book. Read here.

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Extension: Add a 3D Object

In this early Montessori sensorial activity, your child matches an animal’s photo card to its coat card, or the coat to the animal.

Once that is comfortable, add a third piece.

Hand your child an animal figurine and let them match it to the photo card or the coat. A card is flat. A figurine has weight, size and texture in the hand. Moving from the object they are holding to the flat image of it is a step up in abstraction, and it asks more of your child than matching two pictures.

Figurines are optional. The activity works with the cards alone, and the animals already in your house work just as well.

Why Hands-On Learning?

Young children learn by doing. They try something, it doesn’t work, they adjust, they try again. The understanding arrives through the hands before it arrives anywhere else.

Hands-on learning is the everyday name for Experiential Learning: immersing yourself in a process in order to learn it. The idea is ancient. Around 350 BCE, Aristotle wrote that we learn by doing. Much later, John Dewey built a philosophy of education around it, and Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget shaped how we understand it now.

How to embrace it. Let your child do the doing. Sorting and classifying. Pouring and transferring. Making and creating.

A child cannot do the doing unless someone hands them something to do.

Summary:

Animal Coats Matching gives a young child something real to study. It starts with picture to picture at around 12 months, moves on to matching a coat to its animal, and opens up again when you add a figurine at around 18 months. The order is what makes it work, and the photographs are real on purpose.

A toddler does not need a flying elephant. A leopard’s coat is already extraordinary.

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