Literacy & ABCsPreschoolers4 Comments
George has been practicing his name a lot in preschool so far this year.
He knows the letters. He knows what letters are in his name. But we’re still working on the order of the letters of his name.
I set up this activity as a fun way for him to unscramble the letters of his name and put them in the correct order.
I also made it a race track for him to drive down as he did it, as a way to entice a little boy to learn. It usually works… but just read on and see what he thought.
To make the race track, I simply taped down lines on the floor. I taped down a ‘track’ for every letter of his name. (You know I love to use tape! Always painters tape!)
I wrote the letters of his name on sticky notes. Using a capital letter G for the first letter in his name, followed by lowercase letters.
Why lowercase and not all uppercase? Because every time I share a name activity, I have always done uppercase letters, just because that’s what seems natural to do for some reason. And every time I share it, I get comments that tell me that’s not the way to learn. They need to know their first letter of their name is uppercase followed by all lowercase letters. It makes sense. So I’m trying it. Click here for some of our activities for learning lowercase letters.
I made three sets of his letters on sticky notes.
To get things started for George and for him to have something to look at, I stuck down the letters of his name in the first ‘slot’ of the race track.
I also stuck down a G and an e, just to get the next ‘slot’ started.
Then, I took the rest of the sticky notes and placed them at the other end of the track and scrambled them all up.
I went on to tell George a elaborate story (for me anyway, I’m not much of a story teller) about how the letters got all scrambled up and we needed the transformers to save the day and help unscramble them back to his name! Please help!
He’s been really big into transformers lately, and recently got a couple new ones for his birthday. (Drift and Optimus Prime can be found on Amazon, these are affiliate links. Thanks!)
That worked and got him started making his name.
George found the letters, not in order or anything, but found a letter ‘e’ and looked at which track the e’s were in and drove it down to stick it in place.
Came back and did it with another letter.
When George was almost done, he only had about three more letters left, he stopped and told me:
Mom, this is dumb.
Well, I can’t win with them all I guess!
He did go on to complete his name and that was it. No more. No more variations. Just that. It was over.
More move and learn ideas:
- Play the Pumpkin Shape Game from The Pleasantest Thing
- Say & Stomp ABC Active Learning Game at Coffee Cups & Crayons
- Build My Name Apple Tree Game at Toddler Approved
- See all our Move & Learn Activities
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Denise says
I applaud your creativity
Deborah says
Haha! Love his comment at the end!!
Jamie Reimer says
Oh Deborah, I’ve been waiting for someone to catch that :P (Sometimes I feel that no one reads and its all for the photos).
Deborah says
i love this game idea. I think I will adapt it to matching sounds of the first letter and a picture.
My son has learned the spelling of his first name and will spell it out, quite proudly, to all who will listen.