Montessori Language: Labeling the Environment

Lila has been steadily chugging along through the green series, but I could see that she was tiring of always learning new material and really wanted a chance to practice reading more. I put together this labeling the environment work, and she has been loving it!

I walked around our homeschool preschool room and wrote out some quick labels on cardstock that I thought Lila would be able to decipher — names of specific materials, pieces of furniture, things like that [all nouns]. I decided to hand-write the labels instead of printing them out because I wanted to show Lila that she could ALSO write labels. I put the labels in a bucket and showed Lila how to choose a label, read it, and then place it on the correct object.

Every time she does this work, Lila’s eyes light up and she smiles the biggest smile when she realizes that she can read what’s on the label and knows exactly where to put it.

After a few times with the same labels, I asked Lila if she would like to write some labels for objects in the room that we didn’t yet have labels for. I’ll bet you can guess her answer!