A Print Rich Environment

This picture set wall dictionary of A-Z, is introduced to students in their first month of NE. It supports beginning phoneme knowledge as well as letter formation. These are the first parts of environmental print students are encouraged to use. 

Steadily over the year the classroom environment is becoming richer in print. Each resource has a specific purpose, but there is a lot of overlap with the resources. For example, there are 3 different A-Z wall dictionaries. The charts above have pictures to match commonly used nouns. Additionally, this set contained the first 300 most commonly used sight words, sufficient to support all junior school needs in writing. The first 300 words make up 85 % of all words children up to age 10 write. 

The set on the left is a more advanced wall dictionary. It includes a more comprehensive list of common nouns with picture cues. Additionally, it has the same words as the schools own seven Word Ring lists. These are also in the same colour to support students making the connection, e.g. shouted is in the blue list below and also it is written in blue on the wall dictionary (above left). I am only just introducing this dictionary to my more advanced writers.

These are the seven Word Ring lists used by the school to support and track the learning of high frequency word and early spelling. I have made these a continual focus this year with excellent results. Matching rings of each set hang from hooks, along with word searches and other related activities. The students love playing teacher and drilling each other with the sets on rings. The earliest activity I set new students is to  match words from ring with words on the wall.

Pink works roughly correlate to Green level readers. From experience I find children learning their pink words or who have completed all seven lists are at national standard for 1 year at school. 

There are two addition print sources on the walls at present. Firstly, I have added posters of target nouns. In our Oral language programme, Whai Wahi, we have been focussing on food. There are several large posters of food items along with sentence frames to encourage students to engage is writing about food. Similarly, there is a large poster of places in the community. This is to support recount writing. 

One of the other ways I have supported student literacy is in the use of the Yolanda Sorryl Early Words programme with the whole class. I introduced one new sight word a day (4 a week). We read through the chart together as a class. These were then put up on the walls along with sentence frames to support the use of that key word. Students were encourage in their writing programme to use these posters and sentence frames. In reading the charts support fluency as students read around the wall. 

​I look forward to building an even more print rich environment as I support and respond to further learning.