Take a Closer Look: Write Around the Room
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Activity Description
Encouraging kids to write around the room focuses their attention to environmental print in their very own home, and it is a great way to get kids writing, looking closely at letters, and learning some new words. All you need to write around the room is a notebook or clipboard, a pen/pencil/marker, and a room in which to write!
Why This Is Helpful
Environmental print is text that is found anywhere and everywhere in the environment. Environmental print includes the words on the cereal box, labels on the boxes in the toy room, brand names on clothes, messages on billboards, the text on posters, magnets, or food labels. Pointing out and reading environmental print to young children emphasizes the importance of literacy and can get children excited about learning to decode the world around them.
What You Need
- Paper/Notebook/Journal
- Clipboard
- Pen/pencil/marker
- A room full of environmental print
Here's What To Do
- Choose any room your house (preferably one with a lot of environmental print). For example, in the living room you may find board games, toy boxes, books, posters, or magazines with environmental print to use, or in the kitchen, perhaps environmental print can be found on a calendar, messages on a cork board, or boxes of crackers, pasta, or snacks.
- Give the child a clipboard, a blank piece of paper, and a pen, marker, or pencil.
- Walk around the room with him/ her, pointing out the words, letters, and numbers on anything and everything—games, books, newspapers, boxes, toys.
- Have the child skim the room to find a word and write it down on her/his paper. Encourage him/her to observe the room and pay close attention to the letters and do her/his best to write the same letters on the paper.
- Give the child a number to work toward (perhaps the same number as his/her age) and challenge her/him to find that number of words in the room to write on his paper. For example, if the child is six years old, he/she would need to find six words.
- When the child is finished, read the words together. Talk about the words he/she wrote, defining new or difficult words and trying to find connections among the words: Are all of the words from titles of books? Are they names, or do they show what room you were in? Do the any of the words begin with the same letter? Do any of the words begin with the same sound? Which words rhyme? Which word is the longest, and which is the shortest?
- Work together to create a simple sentence or short story using some (or all) of the words that the child wrote down. Encourage the child to stretch her/his imagination and have fun with it!
More Ideas To Try
- Have the child choose a room to find words, and the adult can guess, by reading the words on the paper, which room he/she was in.
- Allow children to work together writing all of the words in a room by being "in charge" of certain areas of the room.
- Use the Alphabet Organizer to organize the "found" words and put them in alphabetical order.
- Send a postcard to a friend, using the Postcard Creator and making sure to include as many of the words "found" in the room as possible.
- Create a word search for the child to solve using the words he/she found during the activity.
- Choose another location to complete this activity! Ideas include the school, library, grocery store, or on a road trip!
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