Spray Your Name Game

Name activities are always a favorite at our house. Add in a spray bottle and my kids are happy all day!

A few weeks ago we did a Build a Photo Garden activity with my toddler and after leaving it up for over a month we decided to repurpose the flowers to create this fun Spray Your Name Game!

To get started you just need a few materials!

Materials Needed: laminated flowers (or whatever shape you want to use! cars, trains, dogs, etc), dry erase marker, spray bottle with water, duct tape/painters tape, and a dry towel.

The goal of our name activities is to get kids familiar with the letters in their name. We talk about the letters, sounds, and work on identifying them! As my kids enter preschool we also try and make sure we always start our name with a capital letter and use lowercase letters for the rest of the name.

Prep-ahead

First you need to hang your flowers (or whatever you decide to use) on the wall outside! We hung ours on our wooden fence, so I used duct tape to the secure it in place. You could also use painters tape and secure the flowers to the side of your house.

Next you need to write your child's name on their flowers with a whiteboard marker. The reason I use a whiteboard marker (versus a sharpie) is so that we can reuse the flowers again and again for other purposes AND so that we can wipe the letters off and re-write them on as part of our name exploration!

To Play

Since this activity is all about exploring the letters, I mostly just let my daughter spray and talk about her name. She started by counting the letters in her name and then going through and touching each letter. If she touched a letter and said the wrong letter name I would chime in with the correct name. For example, I would say something like, "You found the C in the your name! There's a C in the word cat too..." INSTEAD of saying "no that isn't T that is a C."

Why? Because when I say "no that isn't a T, that is a C"... my daughter just hears "no" and "T" repeated (the wrong way). Since kids often only hear the first part of what we say, it is important to tell them what we want them to know, not what they are doing  incorrectly. 

Here are some ways we played...

• spray your favorite letter and say it (Catie sprays e and says E!)
• spray the letter that makes the sound that you hear (mom says /c/ and Catie sprays the C)
• spell your name while you spray (spray C and say C, spray A and say A...)
• spray the letters backwards and say each letter
• spray the letter mom says ("Spray E", so Catie's sprays E) 
• wipe letters off using a towel, say each letter name while you wipe

After playing a variety of different ways my daughter just sprayed however she wanted and sprayed herself too!

This was such a simple activity to do together while my littlest took his nap!

If your child loves exploring his name, here are a few of our other favorite name activities...

Paper Plate Name Game

Rainbow Name Hunt

Letter Pad Name Spelling

Rainbow Caterpillar Name Activity

PS- Don't forget to enter our cool Word Construction Set giveaway from Learning Resources!

PPS- Check out our E-book!

Zero to Two: The Book of Play (my e-book) is full of fun activities for babies and toddlers. Many of these activities provide great opportunities for speech and language development. Download your copy here!