Name Activity for Early Childhood

Happy back to school friends! Sorry for time with no posts. It's been crazy but I have lots of fun ideas all saved on my phone to blog about so I promise to get caught up!

This post is inspired by a typical activity from preschool. I kept seeing all these fun name activities to teach students their names. The goal for our school is to transition our students back to their neighborhood schools so I always like to see what activities they are doing in typical classrooms. 

I found this fun name activities and with a few tweaks made them for our preschoolers. 

The name activity I made for our Braille readers have actual Braille and simulated Braille using buttons, felt circles or pins. The green dots are textured dots so students can point out individual letters. NOTE: The enlarged dots (made with buttons, pins, etc) are for our pre-Braille readers. It is to "warm up" their fingers and get them learning about the dot combinations. I also used Braille labels to type out their names in Braille. You can also use the ABC stickers from APH (ask your TVI for some stickers--they also have print  & Braille).

I used the KG Red Hands font to make these. I looked around for some free teacher fonts and I like this font because it has a bold and an outline of the font. It's easy to read (not a lot of visual clutter) but still looks like kid font. It is important to know what font size or just size that your little ones can see. Regular ed teachers may need a little support for this from TVIs.  Also, be careful about the white background with lamination. It might be too much glare for some kids (both the laminate and the white could be too much). I made a few other versions of these and used green outline to the letters because some of my students see green (or red) when those highlights are there. Make sure there is still contrast (meaning don't use green letters on green paper--that's probably too much green).

Make sure that whenever there is Braille that there is print as well (as a cheat for people that don't know Braille). See the above picture with the Braille cards.  The teachers had a great idea of putting a straight line of Velcro so students can just put their letters on the line.

Remember to keep your Braille labels consistent like the ones in the picture above. I didn't want our students to feel all over the paper to find the Braille. The Braille letters of Maeve's name are consistent--they are straight and in the same place so she can track.  I liked this idea because it is something that our kids will recognize when they move to the district in an early childhood class. We did make some printouts (with the same font--in the outline version) so our kids could trace and start their writing skills. These are easy to make! You just need cardstock (I also like to add a pop of color as a frame), laminate (they also make non-glare laminate if you have students that are sensitive to glare), Velcro and items to make your Braille (be careful of the size of the buttons. I noticed that one set of sim Braille was a little too big for our students' little fingers).  Best part of this whole activity: it's teaching the Expanded Core Curriculum!