Sean Patrick has really just lately taken an interest in writing.
We have done lots of pre-writing activities to work out his little muscles in his hands to ready him for writing…with Playdough, drawing in the dirt with sticks, driving his little cars all over different surfaces, chalking outside, coloring, tearing paper, etc.
But only lately has tracing HIS letter “S” really become a priority.
When I introduced him to holding his crayon with the “ALLIGATOR CHOMP” he became obsessed with it… he would literally tell random receptionists in offices that he could hold his crayon with the alligator chomp too.
This grip has to be modeled and you may have to take your little one’s hand to get them to have a feel for it, but first we did the alligator chomp without holding anything in our hands.
I have really started to take advantage of the love of his pencil grasp and his love for his letter S by trying out lots of different tracing activities.
I always model what he is going to do first, then I take his hand and we do it together (if he will let me – independence is important to him too), and then see what he can do on his own.
1) I wrote out his name while singing his song (I always do this first…. he knows his song).
2) Then I showed him how to trace his S with a little saying “Make a ‘c’ and then back around” (talking out the process of making the letter is important).
3) He then traced his “S” in every color … also called “rainbow writing”
4) We then put a paper over his name written in black marker so he could trace his name that way.
5) Since he mostly focused on “S” we made an entire page of just “S” and he had so much fun with this. He finally took off the top paper and started tracing his “S” with all the colors again, but side by side as shown in the following picture would be the next step after he masters tracing 🙂
If you try this and it is not fun for your little one… then go back to some of the pre-writing activities I mentioned earlier. You don’t want writing to be stressful for your little one… your little one will write when he/she is ready 🙂
Here is a short video demonstration:
If you have any questions or tips to add then please message or share them here in a comment on this post!
