Name Recognition Pockets.

Suitable for 2+
Set up – 15 minutes (excluding paint drying)

Resources;
. Lolly sticks (at least one per letter of your child’s name.)
. Paint
. Paintbrush
. coloured Paper (matching the paint)
. Pen (I used a sharpie)
. Masking tape

The set up.
Paint the lolly pop sticks a different colour for each of the letter in your child’s name. For example the first ‘a’ in Ayla’s name was red, ‘y’ was green, ‘l’ was blue and the second ‘a’ was yellow. I painted 4 lolly popsticks for each letter so I had 16 in total. While the paint drys make your pockets, I cut each piece of paper in half length way, you only need one side. I then folded the paper upwards about 2/3 down and used the masking tape to secure it in place. repeat this until you have the same amount of pockets for your child’s name. You should now have a pocket for the lolly sticks to be sorted into. Write one letter of your child’s name on each pocket, it is best to write the letters in lower case form because 95% of writing is written in lower case so it will just support them with recognition of letters they will find while reading. Once the paint it dry on the lolly sticks write the letters on the stick that matches the coloured pockets. For example all my red sticks had an ‘a’ written on them, all my green sticks had ‘y’ written on then and so on. Then you are ready to go!

How to make the most of this activity.
As your child places a stick in the correct pocket make the phonetic sound. For example “That’s right! That one is ‘a’ for ant.” Once Ayla put all the sticks in the pockets I pointed to each pocket and made it’s sound, Ayla copied me at each pocket “‘a’ ”y’ ‘l’ ‘a’ is for Ayla who’s name is that?” This acitivity is very much an introduction to name recognition, Ayla was mainly using the colours to sort the sticks which is fine!

Adaptions.
For younger children you could just use this as a colour sorting activity, no need to write any letter on the pockets or sticks.

For older children you could do it with simple words or even remove the colour hints and make all the letters and sticks the same colour.