You will need:

• Blue card
• Brown oil pastel/crayon
• Pink paint
• Sponge
• Pink tissue paper
• Pink card
• Felt pen
• Scissors
• Glue

Step 1: Draw the branches of your tree

Take a large sheet of card and draw the branches of a tree using a brown oil pastel or crayon.

If you prefer you can cut a tree shape out of brown card or paper and stick it onto a background.

It’s a good idea to include as many main branches as there are letters in your child’s name to make the activity easier for them.

Step 2: Add some cherry blossoms

Now for the fun bit. Make lots of pink paint splodges around the branches.

You can do this with a paintbrush or by cutting out a small piece from a kitchen sponge and dipping it into pink paint.

Print lots of little pink splodges all over your tree branches. We dipped our sponge in dark pink first and then added some light pink splodges later.

Now your tree is covered in pretty cherry blossoms.

Step 3: Cut out some larger blossom flowers

Take three sheets of pink tissue paper and, holding them together, cut out some flower shapes.

Step 4: Make your name counters

Cut some small circles out of pink card.

On each circle write a letter of your child’s name.

Step 5: Make your blossom letters

Glue the pink letter circles into the centre of a tissue flower.

Then glue a second and third tissue flower underneath so that your blossom looks super pretty.

Do this for each letter of your child’s name.

Step 6: Ready to play

Ask your child to place blossom flowers on the tree to spell out their name.

If they are just beginning to learn how to spell their name then you could write it down on a piece of card so that they can find each blossom letter and place it on the tree in the right order.

If they are more familiar with how to spell their name you can make things a little harder by jumbling up the letters first.

You could pop a blob of blue tac to the back of each blossom letter so that they stick to the tree but can easily be removed when your child wants to play again.