My baby is now 3 years old and this year is attending a 3 year-old preschool group, twice a week for 2.5 hour sessions (total of 5 hours per week). He is just loving the socialisation, play-based curriculum and the fact that it's practically like being at home, but instead of one activity at a time, he can race around from activity to activity doing whatever tickles his fancy at the time.
It's no surprise that in a 2.5 hour session he finds the time to do rice play, painting, playdough, water-play, building, sand play, reading, pretend-play, cutting & pasting and a whole lot more!
One of the things that is important for him now that he is playing and learning independently outside of the house, is being able to recognise his own name. Each child at preschool has their own locker to put their bag and each has their name on it. As most children this age are pre-literate, they also include a photo of each child next to their name so that they can make the connection between their own face and the combination of letters that makes up their name. He also has things like drink bottles and hats that are now labeled with his name, so there is a lot of chance for exposure and it's something that he needs to be able to recognise.
Learning to recognise, read and write your own name is predominantly a matter of being exposed to it and having experiences with it, a number of times. Children are all different when it comes to how quickly they are able to learn something. Some children are able to have very few experiences with their name before they are able to recognise it for the word that it is, and some children will need to be exposed to it hundreds of times before they are able to have consolidated the learning. Most children sit somewhere in the middle of a bell curve graph of learning abilities and will pick up some things quicker or slower than others. We're all individuals.
So, in order to learn our name, we need to be exposed to it and have experiences with it. There are tons and tons of different ways that you can get children writing, reading and playing with their name. Here is one simple activity.
