At a Glance
This printable rhyming potions game gives your preschool, kindergarten and other young learners 28 potion bottles to sort into 14 rhyming pairs. It builds phonological awareness, listening skills and visual discrimination, and it can work as a literacy center you can reuse year after year.
Every good spell needs the right ingredients! And for this one, that means they have to rhyme.
This is a lovely little early literacy game for your learners. There’s 28 potion bottles (making 14 rhyming pairs) and one cauldron for mixing them all up in.
Your children will need to hunt through the bottles to find the two pictures that rhyme, drop the pair into the cauldron together to complete the spell, then stack that finished potion to one side and go looking for the next match.
If your kiddos are already fans of our spooky Halloween printables, they’re bound to enjoy this.
What Skills Can Your Little Ones Learn?
For a simple game, there’s actually quite a lot of skills that can be learned and practiced!
With this potion rhyme matching game your little ones can develop:
- Phonological awareness – hearing that words are made of smaller sound units.
- Rhyme recognition and onset-rime awareness – the specific skill of isolating the rime (the vowel and following sounds in a syllable) and noticing when two words share it.
- Auditory discrimination – telling similar sounds apart. Sock and clock rhyme, but sock and stick do not and hearing that difference is a skill.
- Visual discrimination – scanning 28 bottles to locate a specific picture builds the same careful looking skill that reading will need.
- Vocabulary – some of the pictures may be new words for younger children.
- Fine motor skills – picking up, placing and stacking the potion bottles gives hands plenty of practice, especially if you add tongs or tweezers into the mix ooooohhhh.
- Concentration and working memory – holding one word in mind while searching for its partner.
- Speaking and listening – played in pairs or a small group, this turns into a lovely turn-taking activity with lots of talk.
Who’d have thought such a simple game can help your children develop so many skills – that’s the power of play!
How To Prepare This Halloween Rhyming Game
First you’re going to want to download the rhyme matching game by clicking on the download box at the bottom of the page.
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Then, print it out onto paper or card.
Next, cut the pieces out and you’re pretty much good to go.
There’s 14 pairs of matching cards and a cauldron base to place them onto. I gave the cauldron page a border so you can just leave it as it is – or cut it out if you have a bit more time.
I’d advise laminating them after as it will keep them nice if you want to use them again.
Now you’re all set and ready to play!
Get Even More Out of This Rhyming Potions Game
If you laminate these, they’ll last you years, so here are some other ways to get more out of them.
Cast the Spell Out Loud
Before a pair goes into the cauldron, have your little ones say both words out loud in their very best witchy voice. “Frooooog and looooog!” Stretching the words can help to slow down the sounds and can make the shared rime easier to hear.
Play It as a Potion Memory Game
Turn a number of matching bottles face down in a grid and play it as a classic memory game. Children flip two at a time and keep the pair if they rhyme (that rhymes!). It’s harder than the normal version because they’re holding pictures in their head as well as listening for the rhyme, so it makes a great step up for children who have mastered the original game. Reduce it to eight or ten bottles for younger players.
Fill a Real Cauldron
Pop a black (if you’ve got it but any will do) mixing bowl on the table in place of the cauldron base sheet and let children drop each completed pair in for real. You could add some green dyed rice, or shredded paper etc. then get a wooden spoon for stirring and it becomes a proper invitation to play. If you want to stretch those little hands further, hand over a pair of tongs or tweezers and make them fish each ingredient out again once the spell is complete.
Send Them On a Potion Hunt
Hide the 28 bottles around the room or the yard and give children one half of a pair to carry as their clue. Off they go to find its rhyming partner. It makes the game more active and social if a few little ones are playing, and they’ll probably end up helping each other out.
Invent Your Own Ingredients
Give children a blank potion bottle shape and ask them to draw a brand new pair of rhyming ingredients for the cauldron. Coming up with the rhyme themselves is a super next step beyond recognizing one, and you’ll get some awesome and strange potions out of it. If they do a great job and color them in, why not laminate them and add them to the set?
A Spellbinding Halloween Center
Set the game out as a literacy center for the week, add a witch hat and some witch’s apprentice badges for whoever is doing the mixing, throw in a few other Halloween activities and you’ve got a very inviting space.
However you use these rhyming potions, I hope you and your little ones have a wonderfully bubbly time with them.
Enjoy and let’s nurture those neurons!
