how many letters are there in your name?

How many letters do you have in your name?  Do you have more letters in your name that I have in mine?  Let’s see shall we? 

To begin with you will need to write your name carefully on squared paper, with one letter in each square.  And then if you count the squares you will know how many letters you have.  

And if you lay your name carefully alongside someone else’s name, you can compare to see whose name is the longest and whose the shortest.

You can count to see how many people have 5 letters in their name and how many have six.

In fact we found out all kinds of things.  We found out that Tim has the shortest name (but as he pointed out, if we called him by his proper name of Timofei, then his would be one of the longer ones).  We found out that there are two people with 4 letters in their name but three people with 8 letters, Nicholas, Melchior and Lakeisha.  An eight-letter name is the longest name in our class.  And funnily enough eight people have 6 letters in their name.

And yes, of course we counted all of the letters in all of the names.  And if you pop into the classroom and take a look at our letters-in-your-name graph, you too will be able to do so!