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If you’re working with preschoolers, you know name recognition is one of the activities you’re bound to run into. We have lots of fun ways to work on Name Recognition, but this clothespin one is our favorite!
Supplies:
- Paint stir stick
- Alphabet stickers
- Clothespins
- Paint
- Picture of your little munchkin
I chose to paint our stick blue because it’s Cannon’s favorite color. Once the paint was dry, I placed the alphabet stickers down the bottom and glued a closely cropped picture of his head at the top. At first I thought the floating head might look a little bit creepy, but he was SUPER excited about it!
To make the clothespins I first put the stickers on cardstock and then glued them on the pin (backing them with cardstock first makes them sturdier). Everything dried pretty quickly and we began our letter-matching activity!
We ran into a bit of confusion at first when Cannon started color matching the stickers versus matching the letters, but it gave us a good chance to talk about looking at the letter on the sticker and ignoring the colors.
Opening and closing the clothespins was a great fine motor task! He really took care to match the letters to their exact place on the paint stick.
I can’t wait to make one of these for each member in our family. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of these paint sticks in the next few weeks!
Do you know know a homeschool parent or preschool teacher who loud love this activity? Sharing it is as easy as clicking the Facebook link on the left side of this page!
Thanks for visiting and sharing the fun!
Just ordered my stickers, can’t wait to make one for each of my son’s preschool class!
Cute idea but I think I would have it going left to right vs. up and down.
This is such a fun activity for my lil tots… I am going to share it with sis who is teaches in pre school ….
I really like the paint stick idea. However, as a preschool teacher, one thing I’d suggest is not using all capital letters to teach a child’s name. We have some well-meaning parents teach our students how to write their names at home. They teach them how to do it in all caps. This is almost worse than not teaching them at all. I just had a conversation with a student who informed me that there are no “ones” in the middle of her name. She was actually a bit upset about it. Her name has double “Ls” in the middle and she didn’t like the way I’d written it on a project we were doing. As they enter kindergarten and move on through the school years, students will be expected to write their names with a capital letter followed by lowercase letters. Ultimately, this is how almost all adults write their names. If we teach all caps in preschool, somewhere along the line the kids will have to learn to write it a different way. Thanks for letting me share my thoughts.