There is no better way to introduce kids to the concept of sounds than through their names. Their name is the only "possession" they bring to school, their names is what makes them special so anything we do in class involving their names is sure to get their attention.
The first activity you can see here was done with half of the class (not a center activity really). They got their magnetic letters, boards and name cards and explored how to build their names:
After this we added the activity to the literacy center and introduced the concept of writing. Kids were asked to write their name if they wanted to. We want them to understand from the very beginning that anything they write will be well written, we want them to have confidence.
As they very interested in building and writing their names we added this game to our literacy center:
They have to build their name and then write it. At the beginning we used the letters cards we use in 4 and 5 but they were to difficult to clean up so we came back to using magnetic letters:
A great sensory game is building their names with plasticine:
Some kids wanted to proved their knowledge of everybody's names so we introduced this game that we usually have in 4: kids have to relate pictures to names.
AS you can see from the pictures, kids are at different stages in their learning process and it is extremely important to give them what they need, if the want to write more names they have the possibility, if they just want to pile up letters they are respected.
