Pre-Handwriting Activities: Setting the Foundation for Success

Writing can be very intimidating not only for early childhood teachers but for students as well. As early childhood teachers, we are well aware of the importance of setting a strong foundation for our young learners by focusing on pre-handwriting activities. One crucial aspect of early childhood education that often gets overlooked is pre-handwriting skills and how that relates to fine motor skills. In this blog post, we’ll explore a range of pre-handwriting activities designed to prepare young learners’ fine motor skills. This will ensure they are prepared to pick up a pencil and write.

Play dough Practice

Whenever we got out the Play dough, my students always got excited! Play dough is the perfect practice for building hand strength and coordination. This is essential when preparing your students to pick up a pencil. Encourage your students to pinch, squeeze, roll, and mold play dough into various shapes. Challenge them to create letters and simple shapes. This tactile activity enhances fine motor skills while sparking creativity. This play dough seasonal set is also a great resource to help your little ones practice building their hand strength.

Stringing Beads

Stringing beads onto a pipe cleaner, a piece of yarn, or string is a great way to refine hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity. It encourages the use of pincer grasp, a critical skill for holding a pencil later on.

There are many different bead options you can do. There are the larger wood beads that are great for children two years old and older and there are the smaller pony beads that are great for children four years old and up.

Sand and Salt Trays

Set up trays, like these here, with either sand or salt and provide students with various tools, such as paintbrushes or their fingers, to draw shapes, letters, and numbers. This sensory activity engages multiple senses and enhances muscle control.

Jumbo Tweezer Sorting

Give each child a pair of jumbo tweezers and some pom poms. Place the pom poms in a bowl, or any container, and children will then pick up the pom poms and sort them by color. You can have them create piles of each color on the table or you can use a muffin tray and assign each spot a color.

LACING CARDS

Lacing cards are a fantastic way to develop hand strength and coordination. Children can thread shoe laces through holes to create patterns, shapes, or even letters. You can easily create these at home by taking magazine pages, coloring book pages, etc. and punching holes around the outside of the picture. Children will then take a shoe lace and practice lacing around the picture. If you want sturdier pictures, you can check out these lacing cards.

Torn Paper Crafts

Torn paper crafts are not only extremely adorable, they are also a great way to practice fine motor skills. There are so many different themes you can use to complete the activity. Simply choose your theme first. Next, print a picture of an object (or draw with white crayon on black paper like we did here). Give your students colored paper to rip and glue on their paper.

Tracing Lines

Once students have built up enough hand strength, they can begin to practice tracing lines. Tracing is an easy activity for young learners to practice writing skills before picking up a pencil. These tracing lines are the perfect practice for young learners.

Hole Punch

This is probably one of the most fun one for kids because they LOVE to hole punch papers! This is also extremely easy to set up, as you just need a hole punch and some paper; you can even use scrap paper! Simply allow your students to hole punch anywhere on the paper.

Hope these ideas are helpful and give you some ideas of ways to help your young learners with pre-handwriting skills.

You can also check out my favorite fine motor practice purchases on Amazon. Any Amazon links I share are affiliate links and I do earn a small commission if you purchase something from my link. This is no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support!