I have been doing The Name Game for at least 15 years. This school year I am revising it based on what I have learned about the science of reading, how students learn to spell words (and names), and how we can help them think about words in a way that promotes orthographic mapping. Namely, I am changing it from letters-to-sounds to speech-to-print. You can read more about this change here.
In this video, we are starting our second time through the list of 24 names. As a reminder, for the first time through the names, for each Busy Bee—special helper chosen through the name game process—we did this:
said the name slowly to feel it in our mouths and introduce students to the concept of names (and words) being made of different sounds
wrote the name while naming the letters
talked about each letter separately and decided if it was a tall letter, short letter, or hang down letter
did the name cheer
wrote a giant Busy Bee note at the end of the day for the student to take home.
This time, for the second time through the names, we are:
saying the name slowly, phoneme-by-phoneme, and counting the number of phonemes in the name
writing a dash for each phoneme
asking what letter we should use to spell certain phonemes (only the phonemes that we’ve learned or that are “regular” at this point)
brushing over the remaining phonemes and not talking about them too much since the students haven’t even learned that sometimes letters say different sounds or sometimes phonemes are represented by different letters.
As the months go on and students learn more about letters and sounds and digraphs and diphthongs, we will have more in-depth conversations about each name. Students will become more savvy about whether phonemes are represented by their typical graphemes or whether they are irregular—known as “hard parts to remember by heart” and designated with a small red heart. As you watch the video, keep in mind that this is the 26th day of school and that only about half of the alphabet has been introduced. As a teacher, I am always thinking about the students’ zone of proximal development and not bothering to talk about skills and concepts for which they are not ready.