Names
“A name represents identity, a deep feeling and holds tremendous significance to its owner.” – Rachel Ingber
Within the first days you need to cultivate relationships and create a community. Learning each other’s names correctly is significant to forming a strong bond with your students and for students to form strong bonds with each other. This can be especially tough, because parents nowadays are very creative with spellings and pronunciations of names. Also, many of our students are from diverse backgrounds and countries. More than likely we will encounter names we don’t know how to pronounce or are completely new to us. Recently, I wrote a post for ESL Library, Let’s Learn Each Other’s Names, with plenty of activities, web tools, and apps for learning students names. Below, I’ve listed a few of these resources and a slideshow.
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Ideas & Resources
- Name Shark is a free iOS app, which helps you learn names. First open the app on your device. Then pass the device around and get students to take selfies and type in their names and details. I remind them to type in the names they prefer to be called. After that you can learn their names through 4 types of quizzes- self practice, a face quiz, a names quiz, and details quiz.
- Pronounce Names is a website and Android app which allows you to type in a name and learn the pronunciation. Students should first check to see if their names are on the website and pronounced correctly. There is also an option to add their names and provide different pronunciations.
- Acrostic Name poems- Using the Buncee letter stickers, students spell out their name on a slide. Students write a sentence or line describing themselves containing the word beginning with the letter. See this example students can copy and adapt.
