Happy New Year From The Silver Room Pumpkins! We missed our friends so much and had the happiest reunion this week. To ease back into our routines after a long stretch of “home days,” we’ve been working with some of our favorite materials, singing our class songs, and enjoying our gross motor spaces. We’ve also started some fun new activities during morning meeting, including name explorations! Learning about their own names is a wonderful way to build children’s early literacy skills, as names are such a meaningful part of who we are. Children often learn the letters in their names before other letters; this builds excitement and alphabet knowledge, and extends to identifying letters in different contexts.

During our morning meeting, the children come up and check themselves in using their photographs, which have their names printed on them. This week, we put the children’s pictures up first, and then invited everyone to come up and check in using only their name. It is not at all expected that the children recognize their names at this age. We are here to provide playful, no-pressure ways to help them learn their names in print over time.

For our first name game, we brought out our silver ceramic jar, which held a special surprise – a paper for every friend with their name on it!

Teachers held up each friend’s name, making the sound of the first letter and then reading the name for each child to come up and put their name in our special jar.

After we all put our names in the jar, we took them out, lined them up, and counted our names to find out how many friends were at school.

The next day, we decided to make a name collage! Once again, we read the children’s names together, noticing the sounds we heard and any letters we recognized. Then, everyone had a turn to come up and tape their name onto our Silver Room paper.

Name activities such as these offer many learning opportunities:

– Connecting letters to meaningful print

– Pride and confidence in knowing one’s name

– Practicing letter and sound recognition

– Fostering a sense of belonging

– Learning about our peers

Here is our name collage! For this activity, we encouraged the children to place their names any way they wanted – some were sideways, overlapping, or upside-down. After looking at each child’s name individually, we wanted the children to be creative and feel a sense of ownership over their contribution to the project. As we explore our names, we will work on other projects and see our names in different fonts, sizes, and contexts.

The children have really enjoyed these activities, and we’re excited to see where this interest leads!