Matching Worksheets for Nursery and Preschool
Matching worksheets for nursery and preschool: draw a line to match pictures, big and small shapes, shadows and numbers to dots. Ages 3-5, free PDF.
- Pages
- 13
- Ages
- 3-5
- Paper size
- A4 and US Letter
- Black ink only
Same worksheets, two paper sizes. Free to print at home, at school, and in a classroom of thirty.
Twelve draw-a-line sheets: same picture, shapes, shadows, numbers
These matching worksheets for nursery and preschool children are the first pencil task with a right answer: look at two things, decide they are the same, and draw a line from one to the other. It is a small skill with a lot inside it, including looking carefully, ignoring what does not matter, and moving a pencil from one dot to another on purpose.
Twelve sheets, four kinds of matching
- Same picture (sheets 1-3). A tree, a house, a fish, a sailboat on the left and the same pictures in a different order on the right. Four pairs on the first sheet, five after that.
- Big shape to small shape (sheets 4-6). Circle, square, triangle, star, heart, oval, hexagon and more. The shape on the right is smaller, so the child has to ignore size and match by shape.
- Picture to its shadow (sheets 7-9). An outline on the left and a solid shadow on the right. There is no detail inside a shadow, so only the outside edge helps.
- Number to dots (sheets 10-12). A numeral on the left and a group of circles on the right, up to 5 on sheet 10 and up to 10 after.
Every pair has a dot at each end, so the line has a clear start and finish.
Why the shadows are harder than they look
Pictures are matched by their details: the windows on the house, the eye on the fish. A shadow takes all of that away. The first time, most three-year-olds match the heart shadow to whatever is nearest. Tracing round the outline with a finger first, then finding the shadow with the same edge, usually gets it.
Nursery, LKG or preschool
Sheets 1-6 suit most children in nursery or pre-K, around age 3. The shadows and numbers suit LKG and older preschoolers, age 4 to 5. The number sheets need the child to count to 10, so if counting is still new, stop after sheet 9 and come back later.
Straight lines are not the goal
A wobbly line that joins the right two dots is a correct answer. The pencil control comes from doing a lot of these, not from redoing one neatly. If the lines themselves are the struggle, pencil grip worksheets and easy mazes for preschoolers practice the same movement without a right answer to worry about.
More to match
Once pictures and shapes are easy, capital and small letter matching uses the same draw-a-line format with letters. Odd one out turns it round: find the one that does not match. The full shelf for this age is on worksheets for 3 year olds.
Printing this one correctly
In your printer dialog set Scale to 100% or Actual size, not Fit to page. Fit to page shrinks the tracing letters and they stop matching the size a child's hand is learning.
Plain paper is fine for crayons and pencils. If your child uses felt pens, 100 gsm paper stops the ink bleeding to the next sheet.
