Environmental Print is the print we see around us every day. These are the labels and signs that we read all day without really even thinking about them. We see them as we are walking down the street, on the subway to and from work or driving around in the car. Environmental print is all around us and our children are learning from it without them even realizing it.
This is often the first reading children can do. Sharing environmental print with our children is just one more way we can show how important and helpful reading and writing are for life. It is some of the most useful writing and reading in our world.
What is environmental print for kids?
Environmental print is the print of everyday life. It can be road signs, labels on food boxes or billboards for restaurants and stores. It is considered an important pre-literacy skill and part of a print-rich environment. Drawing children’s attention to the print in their environment reinforces early literacy skills.It develops and reinforces that writing communicates something to the reader.
Whitehurst and Lonigan (1998) explain that environmental print is a sample measure of pretending to read, and pretending to read is a component of emergent reading. For many emergent readers, environmental print helps bridge the connection between letters and a child’s first efforts to read. Language-rich environments are critical to the development of language and literacy skills for all students. Environmental print is a great source of language and literacy instruction for young children developing their early reading skills. Because environmental print builds on childrens’ prior knowledge about the world around them and their ability to associate symbols with a corresponding object, it can be used to develop skills in all areas of literacy.
Some of those areas include:
Letter recognition: Environmental print introduces children to different letters of the alphabet in a fun and familiar context. It allows them to see how letters are used to form words and understand that letters have specific shapes and correspond to specific sounds. This knowledge is an essential precursor to phonics instruction.
Phonemic awareness: Environmental print offers opportunities for young children to develop phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words, and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds. Environmental print also often uses uppercase letters or simple combinations of letters, making it easier for children to identify the individual sounds and link them to the corresponding letters. Students might also demonstrate their phonics knowledge by sorting words in environmental print by the words’ beginning, middle or ending sounds. Environmental print cards can act as signal words to help students remember sound–symbol relationships (ex., Cheerios for the digraph /ch/).
Vocabulary: Environmental print can open up a child's vocabulary as they expose them to new words associated with the world around them. One way to use environmental print to support vocabulary development is to have your students classify and sort environmental print words and pictures.
Writing: Students can create stories or poems using environmental print as a writing prompt, or they can use environmental print as inspiration to create their own magazine/comic book/ picture book.
How can environmental print be used in a classroom?
A print-rich classroom develops pre-reading skills. Adding environmental print to your classroom will lay the foundation that writing communicates something to the reader. Students will be eager to use these same skills to communicate and model what they see in the environment. By including activities and items with environmental print, educators can provide opportunities for children to connect literacy instruction to their prior knowledge of these items (Prior & Gerard, 2007). Doing so positively impacts children’s confidence in their early reading skills, while focusing instruction on print awareness and development of a variety of early decoding skills such as understanding the structure of text and distinguishing between letters (Prior & Gerard, 2010).
Environmental print materials are easily
accessible and affordable.
Materials can include fast food menus, cereal boxes, food and drink labels, product packaging, catalogs, and common signs like those found on restroom doors.
Find items that capture children’s attention and are relevant to their age and interests.
Great Ways to Explore Environmental Print Both At Home & Around Your Neighborhood
1. Look for Words to read around your home
All around our homes environmental print can be found. It can be the magazine on the coffee table in your living room, the print on the bedspread of your daughter's favorite LOL dolls, the toothpaste brand on the tube in the bathroom or the name of their favorite box of cereal on the kitchen table. It's in more places than you think. Stop and look around and you will find a world of print that your child will begin to recognize all around their house and in the world around them.
2. Read a Book with Environmental Print
There are some fun books that look at environmental print, (books like this example by Shelly Lyons) that look at signs and other print around us.
3. Look for Words that Start with a Particular Letter
For older preschoolers and early elementary schoolers – give them a letter to hunt for around your home or classroom. It is helpful especially for early readers to offer them a letter to refer to. Either a puzzle piece version of that letter or just write a letter on a post it note for each child. Encourage them to search out words from items in your house or classroom, beginning with those letters. Identify the sounds made by the letters in these words. Sort logos and words by category (foods, drinks, snacks, signs).
4. Create your Own Book of Environmental Print
Create a book with your child using print found around your home.
This will help them become familiar with it. Cut out labels and logos from magazines, catalogs, and product packaging. Then sort them by category (like street signs, food labels, toy logos, etc.) and paste them onto cardstock. You can even laminate your pages or put them into plastic sleeves and pop them into a binder. When your book is all done, ask your child to read it to you. It’s important for children to have books read to them, but it’s also important for them to read to others too.
5. Read Signs While You Walk or Drive
Taking a walk through your neighborhood or packing up the car for a drive, environment;al print is all around from traffic signs to billboards to restaurant names.
Reading Corner
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