Once a Kindergarten teacher, always a Kindergarten teacher! Even though I don’t teach children in a school setting anymore, my eyes open up wide and my ears perk up with regards to children and education. Education can come in many forms and what I love best about teaching young children is that you can make games, crafts and fun activities into educational ones so easily! When my friend Tiffany from Naturally Cracked shared her super idea for teaching Your preschooler how to spell their name, I was ALL OVER IT! What a fun way for a young child to have a tangible and fun, yet educational experience.
Tiffany says…
For the last 6 months my toddler has taken a huge interest in letters and really enjoys when I write down his name along with everyone else in our family. We have a beautiful name mural on the wall that we received from Oliver’s Labels and every night he talks about his name and picks out the letters he knows. He starts school in a year so we have been looking at various ways to help him get prepared without pushing it on him.
Recently, we took a trip to the dollar store and found some river rocks and a permanent marker to help us teach his name in a fun way.
Teaching Your Preschooler How to Spell Their Name in a Fun Way:
Materials Needed:
- River Rocks
- Permanent Marker (we used a sharpie)
Instructions:
- Write each letter in your child’s name on a rock.
- Let your child play with the rocks, as they pick them up, you can say that’s the letter “S” for Steven etc. Don’t be discouraged if they don’t want to spell it out right away, letting them play with the rocks and talking about what they are doing is also a learning experience.
- Write your child’s name on a sheet of paper and let him match the letters himself. I don’t correct his work at first as I want each experience we have to be positive so if he puts the letters upside down but on the right spot, it is a celebration.
My guy loves to practise learning his letters and has even started going to the table to do it on his own. This simple and fun exercise cost me a grand total of $2 and will bring hours of fun.
Another fun activity to do with river rocks is to make a Cup of Kindness. This is a fun and creative way to encourage thoughtfulness and kindness in your children.
This is great! Love the rocks idea….we are right in the middle of learning to spell names! So far we’ve been using our fridge magnets. Also Crayola markers have been making it super fun, my girl loves her markers!
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My son can spell his name easily, but writing it is a challenge.
This is so helpful for us. My little guys are working on this right now.
that’s a neat way to teach!
I honestly never thought of teaching the kids to recognize their names, what a great idea! New project for this weekend and using rocks is perfect for my son 🙂
This is such a great way to teach your child, I’m going to show this to my daughter so she can start with my granddaughter!
What a great idea. My oldest children could all write and read their name before they went to school (in Germany), then the rules changed and even Daycare wasn’t allowed to teach them, which they also used to do. I think every child likes to be able to recognise/write/read their name.
they can then be re-purposed into art project
we did some drawing in the sand over the weekend…..my girl loved trying to make letters using a stick in wet sand! Another fun way to make letters is using a small paint brush and water, and paint the pavement with the water. No mess, endless space to paint!
What a great idea! Cant wait to try this out, Thanks for posting.
Kudos to Tiffany for sharing this very fun (and effective) way to help and encourage a preschooler to spell his/her name. It is a bit unusual, and so is interesting.
I just love this! Kids need all the support they can get to build skill and confidence!
This is a fantastic method to help kids learn to spell their name, simple but efficient. I’ve never seen this before and just wish I’d thought of it when mine were young. 🙂