Generally, commercially available software cannot be customised to show only letters from a person’s name. So what do you do when one of the learning goals for a child on the computer is to learn his/her own name? This was a question that we had to find an answer to when we worked with children in a special needs school.

We started off by getting the children to just type their names. However, most of the children with a learning goal of typing their own name, showed very little motivation to type. Many of them wanted to leave once we asked them to type. So we had to try something else.

We noticed that many of them were more interested in using the mouse than the keyboard. So we came up with an activity on MS PowerPoint that allows them to use the mouse and learn their names at the same time.

In this activity, they will have to choose the letters of their names. Each time the child chooses the correct letter, they will be forwarded to the next letter in their name. If they choose the wrong letter, nothing will happen.

We found that with this activity, the child tends to have a longer attention span.

Here is the link to the PowerPoint: writing name

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• Technology For Computer Access