Environmental Print

Do you ever get stuck for ideas for bulletin boards?  I love this "I Can Read" environmental print board.

Bulletin board with cut-out box fronts for grocery products

My best friend, Tracie, gave me this idea while we taught kindergarten together.  It's simple, colorful, fun, and a great learning tool.  I also use this board now in pre-k.  I ask my pre-k students if they can tell me what's on the board.  Of course, they can, because they recognize the logos, pictures, and other visual cues.  I then tell them that they're reading, and they get so excited!

Another thing I made was this environmental print restaurant book, which my kids went crazy for!  They begged me to let them take home the guided reading books, which I actually had every intention of giving them.

Places We Like

I also went out into the community with a sighted friend and he took digital photographs of restaurants and stores located near the school, so that my students could see and recognize actual places that they visit.  I made these into another book that the kids loved.  Here are a couple examples of the photos we took for the book:

Burger King restaurant near my school

Domino's restaurant near my school

These books truly motivate the kids.  There's a Dr. Jean song called "Pizza Hut" that's really great for sequencing, and which goes along perfectly with environmental print books.  What do you think?