HOME LEARNING CHALLENGE
Over the holidays, help your child to look for environmental print. You could take some photos of print you see when you are out and about or make a sticky picture for their Learning Journal. Maybe you can think of another way to record what you have done.
We will have a certificate for all children who take part in the Home Learning Challenge. Don’t feel that you have to join in, though: the best part of being off school is enjoying a relaxed time with your family!
Environmental print is the print of everyday life. It’s the name given to the print that appears in signs, labels, and logos. Street signs, sweet wrappers, labels on cereal boxes and the ‘M’ in McDonalds are other examples of environmental print. For many emergent readers, environmental print helps bridge the connection between letters and first efforts to read.
Adults can take advantage of all this print by using it in ways to talk about letters, words, and print. Like playing the registration plate game during a long car ride, (everyone find an A, now a B) playing with environmental print can be quick and easy.
Here are a few ideas:
- Cereal boxes are colorful and interesting to look at. Ask your child to find the first letter of his name somewhere on the box. See if he can find other letters from his name too.
- Choose a simple sign to focus on during one car trip (example: stop sign, pedestrian crossing, one way). Ask your child to count the number of signs seen along the way. Encourage your child to read the sign, noticing that the same sign says the same message each time. Talk about the sounds of the letters you can hear (“The S makes the /ssssssss/ sound.”)
- Go out and about on a hunt for environmental print. Use a digital camera to take pictures of different signs: speed limit, stop, do not enter, exit. You could use these pictures to make a small book for your child to “read.”
- Cut out familiar words from cereal boxes, labels from baked bean and from magazines. Use these individual words (“Cheerios,” “tomato,” “Heinz”) to talk about capital and lower case letters. Talk about the sounds of letters. Encourage your child to have a go at reading the words you’ve cut out. After you’ve gathered lots of pictures of signs and words from items within the house, you can sort these items by beginning letter or sort logos and words by category (foods, drinks, snacks, signs). Your child can have fun learning to read even when books are not available. Environmental print provides lots of opportunities for kids to interact with letters, sounds, and words. Perhaps these could go in a little book too (ask the nursery staff for a tip on making a tiny book out of one sheet of paper!).
