Everyday Literacy: Environmental Print Activities for Children 3 to 8

Winner of the Early Childhood News Directors' Choice Award.

Teachers can use a collection of cereal boxes and take-out menus as essential literacy tools! The activities in Everyday Literacy integrate environmental print - words, letters, and symbols found in everyday life - into a curriculum that makes it easy to encourage children's literacy every day. Young children develop literacy through direct involvement in meaningful experiences with print. Everyday Literacy provides hands-on ideas for turning newspapers, signs and signals in the community, and catalogs and magazines into literacy experiences.

Key features of this book include:

• Literacy goals to show how concepts of print, letters, and words can be integrated throughout the curriculum.
• 250 activities to practice developing literacy skills, including writing, comprehension, rhyming words, print awareness, sight word recognition, vocabulary understanding, and letter and letter sound recognition. Activities for making books using environmental print, such as "Seed Packet Pocket Books," a book whose pages children create from seed packet labels.
• Literacy games, dramatic play materials, building equipment, and interactive bulletin boards. Activities that integrate print into math and science curriculum, such as, "Shopping Bag Addition" and "The Word World of Magnets." Activities in art, fine motor, and music and movement, such as, "Box Front Weaving," "My Name in Lights," and "Cereal Box Hop Scotch."
• Take-home activities and field trips to places in the community.
• An appendix with reproducible forms and patterns that can be used in the activities, a checklist of environmental print ideas, and list of children's books that include references to environmental print.