How Important is a Name?

Your name is very often the first thing people know about you.  As a teacher, I find this to be very true about all of my new kindergartners.  As I am preparing our classroom, I have a list of names that I write thousands of times (on folders, birthday cupcakes, name tags, supply bins, transportation list, etc) before even seeing their faces.  When first saying 'hello and welcome' to all of the new faces, I try to ensure that I am saying their name correctly.  I double check to find out if there is a nickname or pronunciation that is more comfortable for each child.  The smiles on their faces when I say their names show me just how important their name is to them.

“A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” – Dale Carnegie

I have found that while I know every child's name on day one, it is not that easy for my new kindergartners.  They walk in on day one with 18 names and faces to learn.  Over the first few days of school these children make many new friends, but do not always learn their names as quickly.  They will tell me stories about their friend, but have no idea what their new friend's name is.  All week, we have been working to learn our friends' names.

Today, we read the book Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes.  In this story, the little mouse named Chrysanthemum is made fun of because she is named after a flower and her name is so long.  We realized that it is not kind to make fun of someone's name, but we were now curious to see whose name was the longest in our class.  Each student got their own name written on a sentence strip and cut it apart to figure out how many letters were in our names.  After cutting the names apart, we glued the letters on a graph to figure out which names were the shortest and which names were the longest.  When looking at our graph not only did we realize that longest name had eight letter, but we noticed that many of our names have some of the same letters.  The kindergartners had so much fun learning some of each other's names.  We still have many names to learn, so we will continue with some name games throughout the week!