If you’re new here and/or don’t know much about The Name Game, start with this post that explains all about how effective The Name Game is and how it’s based on Science of Reading theory and practice.
What did it look like the first few weeks of school? All we were doing was writing a name and naming the letters and talking about whether they were tall, short, or hang-down letters. Click here.
For our second time through the names, we segmented the sounds in a name and then figured out how to spell each sound, which is excellent practice for phoneme/grapheme correspondence.
A few months into the year, I use The Name Game to introduce the concept of the heart to indicate that a letter is not making its typical sound. Since the students are so interested in their names and attend so well during this activity, it’s the perfect way to get them ready for heart words and why they’re different from every other word they’re seeing this time of the school year.
In February, once we’ve analyzed every student’s first name five or six times, it makes sense to switch to last names. Not only should students know their last names inside and out—just as they do their first names—but studying the names provides so much fascinating practice in the application of phonics. Students never tire of working with their own names or the names of their peers.
In the video above, I want you to notice two things. The first pertains to the activity itself. Notice that we are not segmenting the last names as we did with the first names. Most of the students are now able to listen to the sounds in a word and write simultaneously (as opposed to first segmenting sounds and then going back to the first sound and writing that letter, going back to the second sound and writing that letter, and so on) and so that is what you’ll see me doing. I say the sounds in the last name while writing the name at my normal pace. Since students understand writing at this point in the school year, they can follow along and they get what I’m doing. I intentionally switched to this because I want more time for our Whole Group Phonics, which immediately follows The Name Game. We have 40+ graphemes/phonemes to review each day and on some days we are doing Picture/Word/Sentence. I am intentionally shortening The Name Game so we have more minutes for Whole Group Phonics.
The second and far more important thing to notice in this video—even if you do not do The Name Game and have no plans to use it in your classroom—is that I am teaching my students a better way to approach words. Every day we that we analyze and talk about the sounds and letters in a name is another day that I am encouraging my students to look closely at words and think about the way that they are spelled. My students are not encouraged to memorize words; they are being trained to understand which parts of words make sense and which parts are tricky. We cannot teach students all the words; therefore, it is vital that we teach them how to teach themselves words. This will serve them hugely with their future reading and spelling.
The Name Game is a great Morning Meeting activity—everyone gets to touch the bee, everyone gets to speak, everyone is noticed and acknowledged—that just so happens to also be an incredibly beneficial ten-minute daily reading and spelling activity. It morphs throughout the school year as the students’ skills grow and change and that’s what keeps it fresh and fascinating to them.
Video: The Name Game Using Last Names