Sign Makers — Invent Symbols for Your Home

After a “symbol hunt” for real-world signs and icons, the child designs their own signs for the house and teaches the family what each one means.

  1. Go on a short symbol hunt at home or on a walk. Look for signs that tell you something without words — the recycling triangle, arrows, the green walking figure, tap symbols for hot and cold, a crossed-out circle, washing labels, the play and pause buttons.
  2. For each one ask: “What is this telling us? How do you know?” Notice that red often means stop or hot, and a line through a circle means “do not.”
  3. Back home, choose 3–4 places that “need a sign” — the bathroom door, the toy shelf, a sleeping baby’s room, the cookie jar, the child’s own bedroom.
  4. On paper squares, the child designs a sign for each place using pictures and shapes only. Ask them to explain the design before posting it.
  5. Tape the signs up. At dinner, hold a “sign quiz” — can the rest of the family work out what each one means?
  6. If a sign puzzles people, talk about how to make it clearer, and let the child redraw it.

Variation: make weather or feelings symbols for a daily chart, or “open/closed” and “stop/go” signs to use in other games.

Requirements

  • Space: Around the home; optionally a short neighborhood walk
  • Surface: Table for drawing; doors and walls for posting
  • Materials: Paper squares or index cards, markers or crayons, tape or reusable adhesive
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child; the rest of the household as the audience
  • Supervision: Light at home; close supervision near roads during an outdoor symbol hunt

Rationale & Objective

Signs and icons are symbols children meet long before they can read, and research on environmental print (Neumann and colleagues) shows that talking about them with an adult helps children grasp that visual marks carry stable, shared meanings — a foundation for print awareness. Designing a sign reverses the direction: the child must take an idea (“be quiet, the baby is asleep”) and compress it into an image that someone else can interpret, then test whether it works. That loop of producing, reading, and revising symbols is what DeLoache calls becoming “symbol-minded,” and it mirrors Teaching Strategies GOLD Objective 14a (using drawings and constructions to represent ideas) and Objective 17b (print concepts). Discovering conventions such as the crossed-out circle shows that some symbols are agreed by society rather than drawn to look like the thing — exactly the nature of letters and numerals.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: notices signs when they are pointed out and names the picture (“a man”) rather than the message; own signs are drawings with no clear instruction
  • Developing: explains several common symbols (“that means recycling”); draws signs that show the object or place; needs to tell people what the sign means
  • Proficient: spots and interprets new symbols unprompted; designs signs most family members can read; borrows conventions such as arrows or a crossed-out circle
  • Advanced: revises a sign after feedback to make it clearer; invents a consistent set (same color or shape for all “do not” signs); adds letters or numerals where pictures are not enough

Safety Notes

  • On an outdoor symbol hunt hold hands near roads and car parks — children looking up at signs are not watching traffic
  • Use the hunt to explain real safety symbols, and make clear that hazard symbols on cleaning products and medicines mean “do not touch, tell an adult”
  • Keep products with hazard labels out of reach; look at them together rather than letting the child handle them
  • Use tape or reusable adhesive that will not damage surfaces, and post signs at the child’s own height so no climbing is needed

Hints

  • Playfulness: issue a “Chief Sign Inspector” badge. Let the child make a sign for their own door and have everyone solemnly obey it — including the adults
  • Sustain interest: add one new sign a week, photograph interesting symbols when out and about for a “symbol collection,” or redesign the signs for holidays and visitors
  • Common mistake: letting the signs become word labels written by the adult. Keep to pictures and shapes first — the thinking is in making an image carry the message
  • Limited space: hunt for symbols without leaving the sofa — clothing care labels, remote-control buttons, food packaging, phone and tablet icons
  • Cross-domain: traffic and hazard symbols build safety knowledge; explaining a design is expressive language; agreeing house signs with siblings is negotiation; environmental print supports early reading
  • Progression: spot and name symbols → explain what they tell us → copy a real sign → design an original sign → test it on the family and revise → create a matching set with shared colors and shapes

Sources

  • Neumann, M.M., Hood, M., Ford, R.M. & Neumann, D.L. (2012), “The role of environmental print in emergent literacy,” Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 12(3), 231–258
  • DeLoache, J.S. (2004), “Becoming symbol-minded,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(2), 66–70
  • Teaching Strategies GOLD — Objective 14a (thinks symbolically) and Objective 17b (uses print concepts)
  • Head Start ELOF — Literacy sub-domain, Print and Alphabet Knowledge (understands how print is used)
  • Vygotsky, L.S. (1978), Mind in Society — signs as cultural tools that mediate thinking
  • UK EYFS — Literacy and Understanding the World educational programmes