Creating a Print Rich Environment

As you may have guessed – we have a home filled with books. But I also try to create a print rich environment in other ways. A print rich environment is one which is filled with examples of print and text – take a look at your child’s kindy or school classroom next time you are there. See all the labels? The signage? The posters with words and pictures…that is a print rich environment!

A print rich home helps young children to become familiar with letters, numbers, pictorial images and words. It tells young children that print is important and has a purpose.  A print rich home has labels, labels and more labels, books, posters, newspapers, magazines…as many forms of print as you can think of.

Display print.

Use print.

Value print.

I’m sure it comes from being a librarian, but I may have a slight addiction to labelling things. And yes it has been suggested that therapy could be an option for me.

A good friend has a daughter learning French. Furniture and items in her house are covered in French words…genius. Many of my friends with children in school have labels and word charts around the house.

“How do I spell ‘fridge’ mummy?”

“Go and have a look at the label on the fridge”

“How do I spell ‘blue’ daddy?”

“It’s on your colour chart, can you find ‘blue’?”

Labels abound in our house. Below are some of my favourites!

PudStar and I made labels for her dresser drawers. A year on they need a bit of updating as they now house her ‘collections of small things’.

 We have homemade labels for things like growing carrots.

We have outside labels (lawn signs from Vistaprint).

We have inside labels (also a Vistaprint lawn sign). I stole the idea for this sign from the excellent Rebecca – someone who also values a bit of labelling.  Check out more of this room and it’s labels here.

There are labels for the inside of books. We have ones that say ‘From the Library of The Daley Family’ which go in all our books. They are the ‘return address labels from Vistaprint here, and are silly inexpensive and I LOVE them! The ones below are my mums and you can read more about them here.

We have clothing labels with pictures…although PudStar told me recently that she was giving these labels to ChickPea as she is grown up enough now to just have words. Oh to be four. 

PudStar has monster emotions on her wall next to her bed, these ones are from Scholastic Bookclub. These came about as I was trying to give her more ways to describe how she felt. We were getting a lot of, “I am SO angry at you!”. Now at least we get, “I am feeling disappointed with you, and concerned about that food you are giving me”. Hmmm, that worked well. 

We have signage for the cubbyhouse which is now an art studio apparently.

Cubbyhouse Post Box

Street to the Cubbyhouse

And the ‘library’ area has lots of labels…as it should!