Using Environmental Print
One of the best resources I’ve found for beginning readers, especially older beginning readers, is environmental print. Look around your home or place of business, or your neighborhood or on your commute and you will see loads of letters and words. If you can make the connection in your reader’s mind between the skills being learned and the words he or she sees every day, you have instant motivational tools.
Here are just a few ways to use environmental print:
- Find target letters
- Tell the sounds that words begin with
- Locate words that are familiar or recognizable
- Find words that have specific phonics attributes, such as long A’s or ending with T
- Find words that match each other, such as ’stop’ on a sign and ’stop’ on a billboard
- Copy a word or words from the environment and then use that word in a sentence
- Make a list of words from the environment and sort them later into appropriate categories
Use your imagination! You can create all sorts of activities using environmental print.