Welcome to another edition of Wait for it Wednesday:
Fun with names ~ ~ name activities are a GREAT way to start the year off for your young learners! When I taught first grade it was a must! We would read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom talk about the letters, listen to the fun song ( Scholastic has this ) and make a fun snack.
Here’s a picture of my sweet boy in first grade with his Chicka Chicka name snack:
This snack does definitely involve some prep: I bag up each child’s name letters or I think finding them in a bowl would take FOREVER! So each child’s name is bagged up and obviously not in the correct order in the bag so they put it in the right order and stick them down on the peanut butter celery stick.
Snack:
** JUST be sure of your kids with allergies before making this **
Another fun name activity is what we called the ‘bean name’. We would teach our students the name poem/chant and then glue beans onto their names on tag board. It looks something like this:
The first few weeks of school we make a BIG deal about their names: talking about how many letters ( and graphing that of course ), talking about how many vowels, how they got their name, what they think of their name etc. We sit in a circle and say this poem together. Our grade level would have a pom pom and megaphone in the circle too. Then we go around one at a time and do one of the things the poem says: sing our name, announce our name, snap our name, growl , wiggle or howl our name, etc. They laugh as we go around and take turns doing it.
So as you can see I have them decide on a pattern first with unifex cubes. Then they recreate that pattern with beans. You can’t see from the pictures but we put different beans in a cupcake pan so they are already separated for the kids and easy to grab. Then we place a couple cupcake pans at each table so they have plenty of beans.
I have this fun pack that helps with ideas on ways to use their names and make learning one another’s name fun the first week or so of school. You can grab that { here } It’s a dollar off this week!
Grab some pool noodles and you have a great build a name center. I cut the pool noodles up and wrote consonants on one color and vowels on another. You can provide a class list and after they build their name they can build their friends names. The best part is, with using a crate like shown you can have 4 kids working at this center at once.
So hopefully you are getting to know your kids and building that awesome sense of classroom community right now in your room. Learning names and having lots of name activities certainly helps to build community quickly. Happy first ( few days or weeks ) of school my friends. You were born to do this ~ making a difference everyday in your classroom!
xox,
