Create a print-rich environment at home to teach your child a second language by incorporating everyday items like labels, songs, and posters into their surroundings, fostering early reading skills and confidence.
Does your family speak more than one language? Make sure to fill your house with print! Using environmental print to teach a second language can be beneficial in strengthening their ability to read in their second (or third) language.
What is Using Environmental Print to Teach a Second Language?
Environmental print is the words children see all around them. It is the signs and symbols that surround them and become familiar to young readers. Children become so familiar with these words that their confidence as readers grows. Has your young tot spotted a giant golden arch and requested a Happy Meal? If so, they are beginning to read!
A print-rich classroom has beneficial words all around.(This picture is a word wall from my friends classroom) Children have an opportunity to interact with these words, their environmental print, on a daily basis. Research supports the benefits of having a print-rich environment for emergent readers and most classrooms display a vast amount of rotating print on their walls. Affiliate links.
What Does Using Environmental Print to Teach a Second Language Look Like?
As a parent struggling to make learning a second language fun and easy, creating a print-rich environment has been helpful. So what does that look like in my house?
- Poems and songs printed and hung on the fridge
- Labels around the house. Our play kitchen, for example, has words in multiple languages printed on it. Would you like a free copy of the labels? Download them here.
- Alphabet poster on the edge of a cupboard. I will often ask one of the children to point to a letter or tell me a word that begins with the ___ sound as I am preparing meals.
- Forward-facing bookshelves in the languages you are learning also double as environmental print to teach a second language.
- A whiteboard serves as a place for parents and children to write letters to each other throughout the week.
- Flip Charts and songbooks.
The KEY to using environmental print to teach a second language is to USE it and interact with it on a routine basis.
Click to read how to make environmental print labels for your child’s pretend play kitchen.
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Thanks for the kids words Natalie! We are very blessed to have in-laws that want to help us teach our children Russian and have gifted us with some very great literature! Kristy – I am happy to hear some of my suggestions have helped. Stay tuned as there will be more posts about environmental print coming in the future!!
Impressive – some of your books brought up so many memories 🙂 I remember Ladushki from my own childhood, but the text is slightly different.