Preschool Writing:

The Label Game

 

Today's Snack: Be sure and read food labels whenever you are serving food to a child. It's a great idea to read a label aloud to a child and talk about how the label reveals what the contents or ingredients of the food are. Serve some canned pasta with mini-meatballs or mini-hot dogs today, and read the label while it's heating up. Team it with a glass of milk.

 

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Supplies:

One sticky notepad | No. 2 pencil

 

 

Young children will learn that words are labels for things and ideas, the way an ingredient label represents what's in a container of food.

 

Long before a child can write, he or she can name things. It's a great way to associate words with what they mean, and start building the child's background knowledge and vocabulary. Those are important parts of a young writer's "infrastructure."

 

Go around your house or group care setting with a pad of sticky notes and a pencil. Verbalize what each object is. Exaggerate the pronunciation to help the child focus on hearing all of the different sounds in each word. The better you can hear the sounds, the more likely you will be to spell words correctly someday.

 

Write the word on a sticky note, read it aloud so that the child can associate the written symbols with the sounds those symbols make when said aloud.

 

Then let the child paste it in place.

 

Have fun, and keep going 'til you run out of sticky notes or things to label - whichever comes first.

 

A secondary game is to flip through magazines, picture books and catalogs with a young child, pointing to objects and "naming names" together.