Opposites with Pictures: Match the Opposites

Twelve picture cards fill this Kindergarten opposites page, six down the left and six down the right, each with a large color picture and its word printed beside it. On the left: a pillow for soft, a puppy for big, an elephant for heavy, a campfire for hot, a sun for day, a candy for sweet. On the right, shuffled: a snowflake for cold, a rock for hard, a lemon for sour, a smaller puppy for small, a feather for light, a moon for night. A dot sits at the inner edge of every card, and the child draws a line from dot to dot to join each picture to the one that shows its opposite. Nothing is written.

Because both members of every pair are pictured and labeled, a child who cannot yet read the words can still solve the page from the pictures and then look at the word that came with the answer — which is exactly how opposite pairs enter a kindergartner's vocabulary. The pairs mix physical qualities the child can feel (soft and hard, hot and cold, heavy and light) with taste and time (sweet and sour, day and night). Only one pair, big and small, is shown by the same animal drawn at two sizes; every other pair is two different things. The teacher asks the child to say both words as the line is drawn: soft, hard.

The page is a matching page, so it prints cleanly on one sheet and needs only a pencil or crayon. It is the picture-first entry to this family; the 1st grade write-the-opposite page asks the child to write the partner word from a bank instead of drawing to it, and the opposite-or-the-same page adds a synonym decoy to each row for children who already know the pairs.