pre-K reading & handwriting fun
Pre-K is finished for us now, but wanted to share some of the letter play and handwriting activities that our son REALLY enjoyed!
We cut out construction paper and I drew letters of the alphabet in upper and lowercase. He took a pin and poked all along the black lines. We then took it into his room with a flashlight, turned off the lights and watched the letters appear on the wall ! So fun! You can do this with drawings too.
I gathered a bunch of various letters from different sources – magnetic letters, stickers, alphabet pasta etc. and told him to hunt out certain letters that matched. The magnifying glass made it so much more fun – and those pasta letters were pretty tiny.
This is our ALL ABOUT SPELLING board that we use for his sister. For him, I jumbled up all the tiles… including the other phonogram tile combinations and challenged him to find all the proper homes for the tiles. He didn’t quit, completed the entire board! A great way for kids to match letters, sounds and practice the order of the alphabet.
The chalkboard in one of the photos is from Handwriting Without Tears using their WET-DRY-TRY technique. However, he liked to fill it up more with chalk and then use the water to draw in the letters. In this activity he had made an X-Ray picture with white pencil crayon on black paper – then glued popsicle sticks for a frame. He then played with the chalk, water, sponge and paper towel in different ways to write Xx.
I had read about using clear pocket inserts with self-made printouts for tracing somewhere… so I had bought this from the dollar store, printed up letters in a clean font, gave him a dry-erase pen and let him at it. Works great!! Totally flexible and reusable!
At last, on his own one day he decided that he wanted to start writing what he wanted on paper. He grabbed plain sheets from the printer and started drawing. Sort of looks like the letter tiles from the spelling board…. Thankfully this was one of the few times he ‘grabbed’ the pen with his fist – he naturally started using a proper pencil grip very early and quickly. I do think using the HWT “pencils for little hands” and the tiny “flip crayons” helped a TON to avoid ‘grabbing.’
