Environmental Print

Environmental Print
I read recently where children come to us knowing a lot more about literacy than we think-I agree, and one way I see this is through teaching with environmental print. One of our county's early childhood resource teachers, Barbie Aufhammer, first taught me about using environmental print as a tool for literacy two years ago. Since then I've been amazed at how much children learn and can be taught using simple and ordinary examples of the print that is plentiful in any home... Here are just a few ways we use it to enhance our literacy learning...

Each month I send a letter asking for specific samples of environmental print according to what fits the season. This helps me keep the print sorted and organized-each month we use our collection in different ways.

October
Phonemic Awareness

To introduce using environmental print, we first talked about things we noticed in the wrappers (letters, colors, symbols, etc.). Then we sorted them by how many syllables each item had.

November

PICTURE COMING SOON!

We created an innovation from book, The Hungry Thing, called "The Hungry Class". We made up rhyming nonsense words for the items brought in. The nonsense word is written on the front of a construction paper flap-you lift to find out what we really want to eat. It's become a class favorite!

December

COMING SOON!