About the Sports What's Missing? Game
Football, rugby, tennis, cricket — match the world's favourite sports in record moves.
What's in the Sports deck
The full deck, so you know what to watch for — 12 pictures: ⚽ Football🏀 Basketball🏈 Rugby⚾ Baseball🎾 Tennis🏐 Volleyball🏓 Ping Pong🏸 Badminton🏏 Cricket⛳ Golf🥇 Gold🏆 Trophy
Study tip: link the first three — football, basketball and rugby — into one ridiculous mental picture. Absurd images stick; lists don't. When a picture vanishes, replay the scene and ask what doesn't fit any more.
How to memorise a learning deck
Learning decks — letters, numbers, colours — are the ones to play with your voice. Say each item out loud as you study the board: the label, not just the symbol. Spoken repetition loads both the visual and the phonological memory systems at once, which is exactly the double-encoding classroom practice relies on.
Test recall by naming, not just matching. After the board hides, ask "which letter was next to the butterfly?" — questions like that force retrieval, and retrieval is what turns a quick game into actual learning. Matching alone can be done on autopilot; naming cannot.
How to Play
- Press Start and memorise every picture on the board.
- After a few seconds the board hides and one picture is removed.
- Pick the missing picture from the answer choices.
- Each correct answer adds a bigger board. Three misses ends the game.
Fun Facts About Sports
- Football (soccer) is the most popular sport in the world.
- Cricket matches can last up to five days.
- Tennis balls were originally white or black before yellow became standard in 1972.
- Basketball was invented using peach baskets in 1891.
Learning deck questions
Can these decks help with reading and counting?
As practice, yes — matching uppercase to pictures and saying letter names and numbers aloud reinforces what phonics and counting lessons teach. They are a supplement to teaching, not a replacement for it.
Which board should a five-year-old start on?
Easy — six pairs. The win rate matters more than the challenge at this stage: a child who beats the easy board three times will march to medium on their own, and one who loses hard boards twice will not.