This is another work I used to have in my classroom, and I knew L would absolutely love it.  You can buy a lot of fancy texture matching works, but most of them actually show the different materials, so it’s more like a visual matching activity with a texture element.  I wanted to provide a work that was primarily a texture matching activity, so I decided to make these texture balloons.

I took four blue balloons and four red balloons — each pair of textures has one red balloon and one blue.  I filled the pairs with several different materials that I had in my kitchen:  rice, black-eyed peas, flour, and sugar (I used a funnel to get them into the balloons, then tied them closed).

I put the balloons into a basket and showed L how to squeeze one blue balloon and then squeeze all of the red balloons to find the one that matched the blue one.  Once she found a match, we put them side by side and started again.

We talked about how the balloons felt using words like “bumpy,” “squishy,” “crunchy,” etc.  L loves this work and is great at matching all of the textures.  N tries to put it in her mouth, because she knows that’s what you are supposed to do with balloons.