Every day we try and practice a few things in a fun way- numbers to 20, alphabet letters, our names (recognition/letters in name/spelling name), shapes, etc. Yesterday for our name practice we made letter dice.
Materials Needed: ABC stickers, or markers to write letters, cardstock, tape, scissors, sharpie, pencil, ABC magnets, magnet board, and ABC pictures (we cut up a copy of a chart in the back of Literacy Beginnings).
Directions:
1. Draw out your die format on paper. I copied a die we already had made.
2. Write out child's name on a piece of paper to put next to them (if they don't know it).
3. Grab the ABC stickers and have them close by.
4. Have child find the letters stickers in his name and stick one sticker in each square. If your child has more than six, double up and do two stickers in each box. If your child has less than six letters, have them use the letters more than once. Hope that makes sense!! I am feeling brain dead this week 🙂
5. Cut out the die.
6. Make three slits (see diagram below)
7. Make a crease on each line and stick the tabs into the slits. You may need to adjust your slits based on the sizes of the tabs.
8. If the sides don't lie flat enough for you, use some tape and make the die look a little bit sleeker 🙂
9. Gather your materials. We got our magnet letters, cut up our ABC pictures, and then brought our magnet board and die to a specific area AWAY from our little crawler (who kept trying to eat our fun activity).
10. Roll the die. Whatever letter is facing up is the letter you work with! Find the matching ABC magnet letter and matching picture. Stick them up on the board together.
11. Once you're done matching all the letters to their correct picture... move them around and work together to spell your child's name.
As we put the letters in order we talked about directions words like beginning, ending, and in the middle! We used the name card from the beginning of this activity to help remind my little guy how to spell his name.
This was simple and involved very little prep- my favorite sort of activity!
Skills we worked included reviewing letter names/sounds, name recognition/spelling, matching letters, visual discrimination (discriminating between letters and numbers), learning and reviewing new vocabulary words (pictures in picture cards/directional words), simple fine motor skills (pulling stickers off paper and sticking them to paper).
I'm sure there are plenty of other fun ways to use our name die... so you may see it again soon.
What is your favorite name activity or craft project that you've done?
Love this so much!! What a great game to continue with in future grades when learning sight words!
Thanks for your comments 🙂 Here's what I mentioned in the post for if your child's name is longer than 6 letters, "If your child has more than six, double up and do two stickers in each box."
Hope that helps!! Send me the link if you try this out. 🙂
wait…what do you do if your child's name is longer than 6 letters?
You could use two dice. Just a thought
I love this idea! Thank you for sharing. We are going to make our die out of a block of wood.