The tactile experience (touching a letter with your finger) is important for building a memory trace. This enables students to acquaint the name of each letter with a visual representation for the letter sound.

For a child who is struggling with their letters, the sooner they can integrate the sound of the letter with what it looks like, the sooner their writing contains more meaning for them. For this activity, we talked about the letters in our names.

We discussed words that begin with the first letter;  and then broke up additional letters into their component parts. Using our fingers, we moved to our writing trays, where we traced (with some help from Miss Carrie) the letters in our name, using rainbow paint and glitter.