These are some of my favorite activities for teaching young children how to recognize their names in the beginning of the school year. Some of the activities pictured here will help children learn to identify their own names, and others will help them learn to identify the names of their classmates too. Both types of activities offer opportunities for learning letters in ways that are fun and meaningful.
Here’s a variation of hopscotch we play to help the kids learn to spell their names. I briefly highlighted the game in this post, but felt it was worthy of a post all its own.
To set up, I use sidewalk chalk to make a square for each letter in the child’s name and a big box at the end to write their whole name. Then I fill in the letters and write their name at the end.
To play, we practice hopping on each letter and saying it aloud. We say the whole name at the end.
(I apologize about the picture quality. The idea for this game hit me when we were outside playing one day, but I didn’t have my camera with me. I ran back out that evening to grab photos since it was supposed to rain the next day. It was nearly dark out when I took these, but hopefully you can at least get the idea. Also, the vehicle was not parked in the way of Luke’s name when we were actually playing! lol)
To set up, I use sidewalk chalk to make a square for each letter in the child’s name and a big box at the end to write their whole name. Then I fill in the letters and write their name at the end.
To play, we practice hopping on each letter and saying it aloud. We say the whole name at the end.
(I apologize about the picture quality. The idea for this game hit me when we were outside playing one day, but I didn’t have my camera with me. I ran back out that evening to grab photos since it was supposed to rain the next day. It was nearly dark out when I took these, but hopefully you can at least get the idea. Also, the vehicle was not parked in the way of Luke’s name when we were actually playing! lol)
| Lilah’s hopscotch grid |
It goes like this:
*hop*
“L”
*hop*
“i”
*hop*
“l”
*hop*
“a”
*hop*
“h”
*hop*
“Lilah!”


