Name Projects

If there's one thing I've learned very quickly about my elementary students, it's that they love to share about themselves.  They want to tell you EVERYTHING about their day, their life, their family, their bathroom habits, etc..  In fact if you accidentally tell them something about yourself they will immediately all start raising hands (in a perfect world) / shouting out their equivalent information.

For example last week while making our Faith Rinngold quilts (I adapted a 1st grade version from a Pinterest picture from this website,) I showed them my example and said, "The story I'm putting in my quilt is about my dog and I playing frisbee".  Then I learned the names of 13 first graders' dogs, cats and goldfish, heard about 10 others with no pets but lots of allergies and a couple of stories about dead pets, one of which was worked not-so-eloquently into a quilt as you can see below:

The love these little guys have for sharing about themselves is exactly why my beginning of the year projects are a little, well, self centered.  The very first project was the monochromatic self portrait:

Nothing more self-centered than that, eh?  It was perfect.  But now we're moving on to some projects about students' names.  Gently rowing the "ME ME ME" boat away from shore.

In 3rd grade we're working on "Name Aliens", which aligns with the cursive unit they're in right now with their home room teacher.

Students fold construction paper hot dog style, write their name in cursive on the fold, trace their name like cursive bubble lettering, cut it out, glue it to a contrasting color, then add eyes, legs, antenna etc.

They thought it was pretty much the coolest thing ever.

Just make sure they write their name on the FOLD, not the opening, and show them how to trace their name without going onto the bottom.  Lastly, with any letters that hung down, such as "g" or "y", I gave them the option of either only doing the top half of the letter, or making it a capital.

My fourth graders are learning about rotational name designs.  Thanks to the AMAZING Mrs. Brown for including this project on her website, along with an instructional PowerPoint.  If you haven't made it to her site yet and are looking for some unique and complete lesson ideas, pop over and check it out!)

Each student traced a paper plate, cut out the circle, and folded the paper in half 3 times to make 8 sections.  They wrote their name from top to bottom in each section, then repeated around the circle.  Use all capital letters and walk around to make sure they are touching the top and bottom of each crease in every section.  Then they can color in their designs and voila, secret name designs!