Our Names Are Perfect!

As your children enter our room , they take their name card and sign in for a new day of school. The children enjoy seeing their names in print, and they are very proud of their names. Prior to beginning our study of our names, we read Kevin Henkes book, "Chrysanthemum"! This story is about a little girl whose parents tell her that her name is perfect! Chrysanthemum loves her name until she goes to school.  The children tease her and say her name has too many letters. At the end of the story, the children change as they begin to understand that her name is really perfect! After this introduction, we began the multiple steps to explore our names.

Last week we hunted for our initials. This week, we placed their initials into the sensory table to see if the children would explore during center time.  Charlie and Lukas decided to see if they could find all the initials again.

Jack joined Charlie and Lukas as he matched initials to his friends' names.

Charlie is using fine motor skills to trace the first letter in his name. While he traced, we talked about how all our names begin with capital letters.

After the children traced the first letter in their name, we had them use gross motor skill and visual perception skills as they applied glue to their capital letter in their names.

We had the children tear paper for their capital letter.  Tearing paper allows the children the opportunity to practice the tripod grip that they need for writing. Sammie is very focused as she uses her fingers and upper body strength to tear the paper and follows the curves in the letter "S".

Anna is counting the lower case letters in her name, so she can count the rectangles that she needs to complete her name.

Sophia is placing the rectangles with the lower case letters to spell her name. This task allowed the children to follow the print from left to right. She also used visual perception skills as she allows enough space to complete her name.

Laura is smiling as she arranges all the letters to spell her name.

When all the names were complete, we used them in a wonderful math lesson, counting the letters in everyone's name.   Max is counting the letters in his name and we discovered that  his is the shortest name in the class.   See if your child remembers how many letters are in his/her name....and if anyone else had the same amount of letters.

Matthew and James David are reading everyone's name as they match the names to the names on our game board from the red hunt. We hung the names with the children's help from longest to shortest. This lesson allowed every child to see that their names are perfect, absolutely perfect!