Labeling the Environment: By the Kids, for the Kids

If you go into any Early Childhood classroom, you might see that things in the room are labeled. This is called Labeling the Environment. Educational scholars believe this is very important. There are even websites that tell you how to label the environment with certain rules to follow:

• "Use upper and lowercase letters properly—only proper names begin with an uppercase letter.
• Words are printed or typed neatly.
• All words are spelled correctly.
• The letters used in a label are of the same size, type, and color.
• The words and letters in a label read from left to right" (taken from Earlychildhood NEWS)
• Don't over label the environment
  

I was a classroom teacher and before the first day of school, I spent a day creating labels for the environment that followed the labeling rules. From my six years of experience as an early childhood educator, I can call all of this nonsense, twaddle, and just plain silly. My students never noticed these words and didn't use them. And this is why: these labels are not created by the child.

I think it it important to label the environment. But I think that the kids need to do the labeling. So, I have some new rules for you:

• Let the child write their own labels, in their own handwriting, in their own way
• Let the child decide what things to label
• Let the child hang the labels himself
• Let the child come up with games to play and activities to do with the labels

Here are some labels that we have in our house. This is an ongoing project and not something we do all at once. I enhanced them to make them extra special for The Snails.

(Don't you just love old doors?)

Happy Labeling! If you do this with your kids, I'd love to see it! Post it on your blog and I will link to it here. [I need to learn how to do Mr. Linky]

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Snailmates Who Are Joining in the Fun

Check out Living & Learning, and see how they label their toy bins and nature shelves.