Word Walls {Our Family Names}

I'm trying to devote every Thursday here at Blissful Roots to something for your kids.  Since I taught first grade for several years, a lot of these posts will probably end up being educational in one way or another.

Do you know what a word wall is?  Basically it's a wall with words on it (go figure!).  If you've been in your child's kindergarten, first, second, or third grade room you probably have seen one.  Upper grades may use them, but not quite like the younger grades.  My word wall in my first grade classroom took up the entire bottom third of one of my walls.    We used our big word wall for high frequency words.  

I love word walls because they're seen often, and are a great source for your child to use with reading and writing.  I can't tell you how many times as a teacher I said, "Hey, I think that's on our word wall."  The word wall would answer a lot of questions for me.  I always loved seeing my students going over to the word wall on their own to write down a word, or helping another student find a word they didn't know.  

Word walls can be based around any theme or topic (seasons, holidays, characters, animals, plants, anything). 

Today, I'd like to share a family name word wall. Our family word wall has all of our cousins, aunts, uncles,... names on it.

All I did was type up a word wall, and then printed it out and hung it where my boys would see it. 

Word walls lend themselves to so many lessons.  Not only can you learn how to spell names with this family name word wall, but you can turn it into a math activity.

  Which letter has the most names?

 Which letter has the least names? 

Which letters have no names?

Whose name has the most letters?  

I also love challenging my twins (who are in kindergarten) to find a certain name, especially if there's a lot of names under one letter.  We have a lot of 'B' names in our family.  Asking my boys to find Braden would require them to do a bit of searching and thinking.

Think about what kind of word wall you'd like to use, and put it up where your kids will see it.  Exposure is the key.  The more often your child sees it, the more it will be locked into that little mind.  And don't worry about taking up a third of your wall at home.  You can make these paper or poster sizes, and they'll be plenty big.

I think our next word wall is going to be a Harry Potter one.  My boys and I are reading book four together, and I think it would be fun to have all the characters, places, things involved with Harry Potter on a word wall.  I'll let you know how it turns out. 

Thanks so much for stopping by!  I hope you found a little something worth your time.

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