Name Recognition Game in a Sensory Tray

Derin is showing a great interest in letters and numbers these days. Often he will take a jar of magnetic letters from the shelf . He loves looking at them and pretending to sound them. I am not teaching him the sounds of the letters just yet but I do encourage him to trace with the  sandpaper letters / numbers and play with the letters/numbers by sticking them on a magnetic board.

 When Derin goes to his nursery, he has to find his name tag and stick on a peg to hang his coat. Therefore he now can recognize his name and if  he comes across one of the letters in his name, he gets excited and says "Benim, benim!" (Turkish for "mine")
The inspiration for this sensory tray came from Deborah at Teach Preschool. Deborah uses name tags hidden in a coloured rice tray for her students.
I have yet to color a bag of rice so I used oatmeal and our magnetic letters. Derin (28 months old)  likes scooping and handling the oatmeal and finding his letters.

It is important to expose children to lower case letters as most of the reading is done with these. Capital letters are only used at the beginning of a name or a sentence in English (or Turkish in our case). So if you intend to buy letters for this kind play, I would encourage you to go for lower case letters even though they can be a bit more expensive.
Charlotte at Make Do And Friend  also has a similar sensory tray for an Alphabet Soup activity which is  great for playful learning.
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