Literacy & ABCs
Spring
St Patrick's DayPreschoolers12 Comments
Make a rainbow and learn to spell your name! This colorful literacy and letters activity is perfect for preschoolers!
George has been learning to spell his name. And he’s getting so much better at it!
This is an activity that was fun to make a rainbow in the process, but also a great way to learn to spell your name!
Learn to Spell Your Name & Make a Rainbow
To make your own rainbow colored name, you’ll need:
- strips of colored construction paper
- paperclip(s)
- marker(s)
- stickers – optional for extra decoration
- plastic bag – for storage to use again
To start I made 7 strips of paper in the colors of the rainbow and cut them at various lengths getting longer and longer.
I then wrote the letter of his name on each one, building on the previous one.
So the smallest paper had just a G on it, the next one had GE and so on up to GEORGE.
I put a good sized space between the name stem and the new letter. For
George only has 6 letters in his name, instead of 7, which I’m assuming is the case for most of your kids, they don’t have 7 letters in their name either.
For George, I just added the 7th paper with his name spelled out and then a heart to be fun and cute.
If you have a kid with a longer name, you could add more than one letter per paper. And if you have a kid with less than 7 letters you can add cute graphics like we did.
Or you could just have more or less colors or pieces of paper if you’d like too. It doesn’t have to be a perfect rainbow!
Preschoolers love everything about learning to spell their name!
Build a Rainbow and Spell Your Name
I started George by having him sort through the rainbow pieces of paper and arrange them by size, like our circle rainbow we did last year.
I suggested that he sort shortest to longest as a fun way to start.
George had a little difficulty with sorting. He started out okay and I don’t know if he just got tired of that, but he started being goofy with it.
So we just scrapped that part of the activity and went on to what the activity is really about. Making the rainbow while spelling his name!
He found the shortest piece of paper with the letter that his name started with: G.
And to get him going, I’d ask:
“Do you see a piece of paper that has that letter G and one more letter on it?”
And that made sense to him. He found the paper with GE. And then I’d ask the same again.
When he found the next one, he stacked them together to see all the colors and paper clipped them together at the end.
This is what makes this an excellent fine motor activity. Paper clips are brilliant for little hands!
I don’t think he realized what he was spelling until he saw it all spelled out and he got excited then!
He continued on finding the next set of letter until he paper clipped them all together to spell GEORGE!
A couple days later, he spotted his name and told me it was his name.
And this part is what got me excited.
It wasn’t just the letter G that made him recognize it was his name. He told me all the letters were his name and spelled it out for me.
Finally, his name is more than just a G.
If you’re on a “name activities” kick, Toddler Approved is my favorite place for fun ways to learn their name. Plus No Time for Flash Cards just shared a spelling game to spell your name.
What are your favorite ways to play with your child’s name? Share your best activities!
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It’s a great way to learn and improve childs brain development.
Irma Green says
wow! It’s nice for learning and for development.
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carol klein says
Great idea. They also learn short to long… I have written their names out then made each letter individually and cut them out. they then had to match each letter while spelling it out.