Letter-Animal Matching

Recently Levi pulled this set of animal cards, a gift from some past holiday (Christmas?  first birthday?  can't remember), off the shelf and they became his second-favorite toy for the time being (the cars are always, always first).  As he was spreading them out on the floor one day, it popped into my head that we ought to work on some one-to-one correspondence.  So I pulled out his Garanimals wooden blocks, each of which has an animal picture on one side (can't find them anywhere to link up!), and had him place an animal block on the corresponding animal card.

That was too easy, so I turned to our letter magnets instead.  It went something like this:  "Levi, can you find the monkey?"  (points to card)  "What letter does m-m-monkey start with?  Can you find that letter on the refrigerator?"  And off he'd go to bring back the letter and put it on the card (usually directly on the animal's face).  Like this:

 (After most of the letters were gone)

The only one Levi didn't get right at first was the elephant, confirming my suspicion that he knows his consonants much better than his vowels.  But still, he has to think a bit to get the others right, so we've done the activity a few times.  A few days ago, I caught him putting letters on the cards on his own, so I know he enjoys it!  (Not a single letter was correct without my sounding out the animal name, lest you think he's actually spelling or something.)  I did a make-shift version with numbers, too, just writing big numbers on a piece of scrap paper and having him match the number magnets to the paper.

[We've also tried the shoe activity posted here and here, but Levi's love of cleaning took over and he finished the activity without me.  He found one shoe, then its match, then put them away on the shoe rack . . . and then proceeded to put the remaining 5 pairs of shoes on the rack in matching pairs.]