Name Art

As an elementary school teacher I always loved doing some sort of name art the first week of school. It helped the kids learn everyone's names and it was motivating because what little kid doesn't like to do something with their name?

This activity is very simple, but could easily be beefed up to look cooler for older kids. It is also great because it practices letter matching and letter recognition.

Materials Needed: variety of foam stickers, foam alphabet letters, colored cardstock, colored markers and crayons, stickers, glue, anything else you want to stick on, scissors.

Directions:
1. Ahead of time, write each child's name in bubble letters on a piece of cardstock or large sheet of paper with markers. If I had been doing these in the classroom, I would've used larger paper 8-1/2 X 16 or whatever it is you can find that is a large rectangle.

Older kids can obviously write their own names.

2. Place alphabet foam letters on a tray where they are accessible to kids. Have kids sort through the letters to find all the letter stickers for their name. For younger kids (2 year-olds), I just gave them the letters in their name or would give them a smaller handful of letters, including the letters in their name (but only an additional 2-3 letters so that they wouldn't get overwhelmed).

3. Have the child match the alphabet foam sticker to the correct letter in their name and then stick it on! If you wrote their name really big, they could stick several of the same alphabet stickers on each letter.

4. Decorate the letters with regular stickers, other foam stickers, and let kids color in the letters with crayons.

5. If I were doing this in my classroom, I would only have the kids decorate the letters and then we'd cut the letters out and mount them on another color paper to help them stand out more.

If you don't want to do that, you could also add glue around the outside of the letters and put on glitter... or use glitter glue to outline the letters.

I love activities that are simple and open-ended, and so did the kids who did this project today. This could also be fun to make into a more textured project and add cut or ripped colored paper to the letters.

Language Building Activities:

- Play your favorite name games
- Sing some Name songs
- Do several other Name Letter activities with small groups or partners