I am very pleased to begin sharing seasonal posts with you in partnership with The Pencil Grip . This post contains affiliate links. If interested, you can purchase these awesome Kwik Stix right here.

It is no secret that we love a good name puzzle over here. I have written about how we have used name puzzles in so many different ways – and today, a new one!

I have mentioned before when I am teaching little ones their ABCs I always start with their name letters. These letters hold meaning to children and they are often very excited to learn them. Once my little one has mastered his name, I will then add in the names of family members. This is a fun way to make sure children understand the value of letters and the purpose they serve. After this, we move on to the other letters of the alphabet using this order.

Now learning the letters may seem straight forward to you and I. BUT have you ever noticed how similar certain letters look? ‘O’ looks an awful lot like ‘C’, ‘E’ is very similar to ‘F’, and ‘J’ is almost a mirror image of ‘L’ to point out just a few!

So, how do we help our little ones to master these letters fully and completely? In two ways:

By going nice and slow (really nice and slow)

And by really focusing on the shape of each letter.

When a child sees the letter ‘O’ he might be able to say it is the letter ‘O’. But in order for him to know that it is absolutely not a ‘C’ or a ‘D’ he needs to recognise what makes that letter unique. This means we need to slowly look at each letter. We need to examine the shape of the top, the middle and the bottom. Does it have any straight lines? Any curves? Are they big or little lines and curves?

This name puzzle is a great way to do exactly that – and it is so easy to create.

For each name puzzle we used 5 popsicle sticks. Ben used our go-to quick crafting supply Kwik Stix to paint each one. I just love Kwik Stix for activities like this because they are so nice and bright and they dry almost instantly!

By the time Ben was done painting one side of each of the 5 popsicle sticks he could immediately turn them over and paint the other side.

We used the same colour for all 5 of the popsicle sticks. Since we were doing 5 different name puzzles, we repeated this same process four more times using different colours of Kwik Stix.

I then lined up 5 matching popsicle sticks and used a permanent marker to write the names of each of our family members on them.

It was as simple as that! Ben could then sort the popsicle sticks by colour and practice putting the names together focusing on all aspects of the letters. He would need to focus on what the letter looked like at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom too.

This is also a great activity for helping children learn that some letters are very tall and others are small. So much learning with such a simple activity!

If you would like to learn more about Kwik Stix, or give some a try,  you can find them (among other places), at Walgreens, in stores and online at Michaels, online at Target, and on Amazon.com as well.

Thank you so much for reading friends! I hope you are having a wonderful day.