Even in writing the morning message on the board, the teacher is targeting the children by placing the message at its proper place at the top of the board and following it by additional activities and a schedule for the rest of the day. When the teacher challenges children to make posters of items that begin with a single letter by using the items in the classroom, their home, or their general knowledge base, the children are making concrete the understanding that print carries meaning.
Strategies for Promoting Awareness of the Relationship between Spoken and Written Language;
- Write down what the children are saying on a chart.
- Highlight and celebrate the meanings and uses of print products found in the classroom. These products include: posters, labels, yellow sticky pad notes, labels on shelves and lockers, calendars, rule signs, and directions.
- Intentionally read big-print and oversized books to teach print conventions such as directionality.
- Practice exercises in reading to others (for K-1-2) through which young children practice how to handle a book: how to turn pages, how to find tops and bottoms of pages, and how to tell the difference between the front and back covers of a book.
- Search and discuss adventures in word awareness and close observation through which children are challenged to identify and talk about the length, appearance, and boundaries of specific words, and the letters which comprise them.
- Have children match oral words to printed words by forming an echo chorus (where children echo the reading) as the teacher reads the story aloud. This often works best with poetry or rhymes.
- Have the children combine, manipulate, switch, and move letters to change words and spelling patterns.
- Work with letter cards to create messages and respond to the messages that they create.
An environmental print book can be created that contains collaged symbols of the labels from, e.g., students’ favorite lunch or breakfast foods. Initially, this can be created by the teacher, but later the teacher can ask students to bring in their labels and alphabetically arrange the cut and clipped symbols from the packaging of these foods into the book. Students can then add to the book as they clip and place symbols and logos from additional sources of environmental print.
Newspapers are an excellent and easily available source of environmental print. With food ads, clothing ads, and other child-centered products and personalities, a newspaper lends itself wonderfully to developing print awareness activities. Supermarket circulars and coupons distributed in chain drug stores are also excellent for engaging children in using environmental print as a reading device. What is particularly effective in using environmental print is that it immediately transports all children, including those from an ELL background into print awareness through the familiarity of commercial logos and packaging symbols used on a daily basis.
Read More : Development of the Understanding that Print Carries Meaning
