A simple way to practice name recognition and handwriting at the beginning of each day.
Since a few of my students have been with me for two or three years now (depending on birth date and kindergarten eligibility), I decided to change up my sign-in routine this year and invite the children to sign-in to preschool each morning on a clip board…
Before continuing on with my post, I will tell you right now that the jury is still out on whether I like this process or not. It is a new classroom procedure that I have never tried before so I have had to make adjustments (and still am making adjustments) as the year has progressed…
How the Process Works
But to give you the idea of how this works in our classroom, as the children come into the classroom each morning, they will find two clipboards set out with a sheet of paper and a pencil. One clipboard has a list of names for our preschool age children (threes and fours) and the other clipboard has a list of names for our pre-kindergarten age children (fours and fives)…
The children find their name on the list that we have printed and then print their name in the space next to it…
Practicing Name Recognition
For our younger children, Mr. Hayden and I have spent time helping them to recognize their name on the list and have spent time encouraging them to either “make their mark” or print out their name depending on what they are ready for…
Shortly into the year, I realized that we were using the wrong font for the name chart so our lower case “a” looked like what you see in this post rather than than the way it should for teaching my students to write the letter “a” so we revised our sign-in sheets with the correct version of the letter “a”….
Practicing the Routine
We spent the first several months of school helping those who needed it to find their name on the chart and make their mark. We also have spent every month since school has started to go and put their back pack on the hook and then go and sign-in. Everyday, the same routine and yet pretty much no one seems to remember to sign in unless I say, “I need you to go sign-in please!” …
I have wondered if this was a good idea or not since my threes were struggling with finding their name and now my pre-k kids were getting so good at signing in their name that they are starting to sign-in using bubble letters and adding curls to the ends of their letters to make them “fancy.” Two extremes in ability and interest all showing up in one seemingly simple procedure…
There have been a few days off and on where we have skipped the procedure all together because the children are either too distracted by other things we have out in the classroom or we are running late getting kids in the door, back packs hung, and coats and mittens put away…
And we don’t always have the clipboard in the same place every morning. Sometimes it is on a table and other times it is on the floor or even on our easel. Where the board can be found depends on where we have available space each morning. So, this might not be helping instill the routine of signing in all that well either…
Reflections on the Process
Although the sign-in procedure has had some ups and downs, last week I observed the children closely and noticed that they are all starting to find their own name without our help and they are all starting to recognize each other’s name and all our younger children are beginning to make more specific marks rather than just a line or coloring in the entire space with the pencil. And one of my threes looked at me last week so proud when he handled the entire sign-in process all on his own. Progress is evident and perhaps I need to make a few adjustment for some of my students, but as I said earlier, the jury is still out on this process and we will see where it leads as we go along…
I am sure some of you have tried a similar sign-in process like this. I’d love to hear all about it in the comments below!
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