Pre-Printing Practice

Hope you all had a fabulous Turkey day! I sure am thankful that I had a few days off from work. I think everyone needs a good break sometimes... and no matter how much I love my students, I needed a break from them :)

I've been noticing some major developmental changes in some of my older kids lately. I have a few (mostly the ones that are 3 years old or close to it) that are really impressing me with the fine motor skills they have mastered. It's at this age that it's really important to refine those fine motor skills. Whether you realize it or not, they are practicing these skills in almost everything they do. When kids pick up those small objects under the couch that you never knew were there or take out the crayons and draw all over the wall, they are experimenting with their fine motor skills. Kids will need these skills so that they can draw, write and turn the pages of a book when their literacy and language skills improve.

I assess my students on milestones weekly and keep re-assessing them as the year goes on so that I can watch their progress. One of the milestones I'm going to start focusing on is starting to mimic letter formation. Most of them don't know one letter from the next but it's more to do with how they "pretend" to write letters when they are drawing or "writing." You may even notice some kids are left or right handed prominently at this age! (I think that's cool)

To give my kids some practice in writing I usually start with learning to draw lines. This is the most simple concept. If you're going to practice lines you might as well practice going left to right to reinforce that sentences will be read and written left to right in the near future. Another step up would be shape tracing or curved and crooked line tracing.

I made a worksheet for them with an outline (dashed lines) of 4 squares. My kids 2 years 10 months and up did REALLY well with this concept. The ones younger than that were a little less interested and didn't do as well... but, we will keep practicing!

I'm going to try line drawing tomorrow. I made my worksheet for that pretty simple too with more dashed lines. I will be doing this one on one with them so I'll reinforce trying to go left to right but you could draw arrows to help, too.

(sorry for the long post!) Happy Pre-Printing! By the way..I am thinking of making cooking up some printables... feeling generous and creative! Haha!