Literacy Spot #44: Take a Reading Road Trip

ByChristie Burnett

Early literacy learning

I am taking a little time offline this week to spend with family and to try and kick the final symptoms of my recent illness.  Fortunately, I have some great blogging friends who have offered to help me out with a series of fabulous guest posts 🙂  Today I am pleased to introduce Laura of The SEEDS Network to share this week’s Literacy Spot…

Children love to use their imagination to play and pretend they are somewhere else.  Taking a trip is exciting!

At our preschool, we hosted a book fair with a theme called “Reading Road Trip”, in which we decorated the classrooms with road signs, pictures of popular landmarks (i.e. Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower), and large maps.  We talked about places we’ve all visited, and also explored new locations through books.  It was great to demonstrate for the children how books could take us to places we have never been to before.

In our dramatic play area, we set up a little “travel agency” so that the children could plan their own adventures or relive a fun vacation.  By saving items from past trips, it is fun and easy to setup a print-rich experience that the children can explore.  By using items from their OWN experience, children can begin to identify words from locations they have visited (for example, children can identify the name “Walt Disney World” when it’s written in the recognizable Disney font on a brochure or poster).

Here are a few items that you can use to setup a travel agency in your dramatic play area:

  • Suitcases, sunglasses, play clothes to pack
  • Old airline boarding passes and tickets
  • Ticket stubs from locations such as theme parks, zoos, museums, ski lodges
  • Map, including local and world maps
  • Brochures and memorabilia from hotels, theme parks, ski mountains and other locations that children may be familiar with visiting
  • Books about different travel locations and landmarks
  • Travel posters (ask a local travel agency for posters they no longer need)
  • Road signs
  • Play camera
  • Play money and cash register
  • Notebook, diary, calendar and pens/pencils for taking reservations

This idea can be extended by creating a family vacation photo album, using ticket stubs, brochures and other memorabilia from family trips.  In a classroom setting, children can bring in photos and brochures from a trip they took and dictate their experience to the teacher.  Then these can be compiled into a class book that then becomes part of the dramatic play travel agency!

The SEEDS Network was created to support early childhood educators, administrators, care providers, advocates, supporters and parents of young children via state of the art resources available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The mission of The SEEDS Network is to provide early childhood professionals with resources and services that support them in their quest to provide quality care and education to children ages six weeks through age 5.

Christie Burnett is a teacher, presenter, writer and the mother of two. She created Childhood 101 as a place for teachers and parents to access engaging, high quality learning ideas.

3 Comments

  1. Thanks for sharing, Christie, much appreciated. I’ll share it to my colleagues, I think.

  2. I still remember one of my most magnificent journeys: a kindergarten “trip” we took without leaving the classroom. You’ve shared wonderful ideas here to make this learning journey happen in classrooms and homes.

  3. I love that idea of taking an imaginary class trip! You could make up maps of the journey and draw pictures of the landmarks that you “see”!

Comments are closed.