When my 3yo started preschool last year, his school curriculum involved tracing letters and numbers. Understandably, he found the exercise of tracing / writing really tasking and it seemed to obviously frustrate him. He's pencil grip wasn't exactly great lol, he couldn't follow the lines properly, and I could see the lack of confidence in his writing skills.
The first (and most important) way we started helping him with this was to build his hand strength and pincer grasp by practicing fine motor skills – before actually tracing / writing. I had to go back to ground work to build the core strength, gross and fine motor skills needed to promote good pre-writing and handwriting skills.
There are many skills required in mastery of handwriting including visual motor skills, gross motor skills, fine motor skills, eye-hand coordination, muscle memory, posture, body control, as well as pencil grasp and letter formation.
One key to good handwriting is continual practice with fine motor skills. If your child has poor handwriting, it may be they need more practice with fine motor skills. But while it’s important to do fine motor activities, you can also give your child opportunities to practice writing / tracing using writing utensils – like markers, crayons, colored pencils, dry erase markers, etc.
So today, I’m sharing 7 pre-writing activities we did (and still do) at home to build strength in my preschooler’s hands, to boost his handwriting skills. After a couple weeks of doing these pre-writing activities, you will notice an improvement of strength in your LO’s hands and better handwriting!
1. Play dough: Just playing with play dough is great for building strength in hands. Practice making balls, rolling play dough into snakes, or other fun designs.
2. Q-tip painting: Practice the pincer grip by painting with a -tip. Kids love this activity and you get to make beautiful art!
3. Lacing & Stringing Beads: You can use our Stringing Beads set or create your own by making Lacing Cards from card stock or using regular beads with shoe laces. It’s really great practice for fine motor skills, as your LO would use the pincer grip to slide beads onto the laces.
4. Cutting Practice: Using scissors is a great way to build hand strength. If paper is too
hard to cut, try cutting card stock, or play dough.
5. Write in Flour: This is so much fun! Just pour flour (or sugar or corn meal) onto a tray. Then let your child write with their finger to make letters or designs. After using fingers to write, try using a writing utensil.
6. Toddler Safety Tweezers: An easy fine motor activity is using toddler tweezers or tongs to transfer objects (like cotton balls) from one container into another.
7. Clothes Peg: a toddler requires a lot of strength to manipulate a clothes peg. I love using count and clip cards for peg exercises (you can get some free Count and Clip Activity cards from the FREE Printables section here). The child simply counts the objects on the card and then puts a peg on the correct number.
So, there you have it! 7 amazing activities to boost your LOs (pre)writing skills!
If you notice your child struggling with certain parts of their handwriting skills, first remember that a lot of children are not ready to properly hold a pencil or write until age 5. It will depend on the child, some may be earlier, some later.
What pre-writing activity would you add to this list? Are there any activities you do at home to build your LOs pincer grasp?
Love & Light,
Oby O
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