Preschool Handwriting Preparation

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Preschool handwriting is often a controversial topic, as many people (including myself) believe young children should not be spending too much time working at a desk, and should not be sitting down to write on paper until at least Kindergarten.

However, it is never too early to start preparing for handwriting, as the preschool years are the perfect time to lay down good foundations for later school skills.

Here are some really important pre-writing activities you can do with your preschool child (and I explain why each is important for helping handwriting skills).

Try and include one or two of these activities in your preschooler’s daily life to ensure they have a good start in their pre-writing skills!

prepare your preschool child for handwriting

The activity suggestions on this page are designed to promote your child's normal development. If you are at all concerned about your child's development, please consult an occupational therapist. This website is NOT a substitute for occupational therapy evaluation and treatment!

Eye-Hand Coordination Activities

Eye-hand coordination is an important foundation for good handwriting. These skills will help your child to trace the patterns and letters used in pre-writing lessons. Good eye hand coordination will also help your child to color in the lines, and later to write within the lines.

Use these activities to teach your child to attend visually while using the hands:

Playing with a ball in a net

Preschoolers get frustrated at chasing errant balls – so put one in a recycled net bag where it can be hit, pushed, and caught without rolling away.

Take a few minutes each day to encourage your child to use the ball in the net.

playing with a ball in a net for eye-hand coordinationPlaying with a suspended ball

Catching Bubbles

What child doesn’t love bubbles? Blow some and let your child try and pop them.

Just watch that the soap does not get into little eyes. 

catching bubbles is good for eye-hand coordinationCatching bubbles

Threading and Lacing Activities

Threading beads and pushing a shoelace through a lacing card are good eye-hand coordination activities for preschool children.

You can make your own lacing cards by punching holes in thick card or thin plastic (the side of a plastic milk carton is great for this).

threading and lacing activities are good for eye-hand coordinationThreading and lacing acivities

Simple Mazes and Paths

Although I don’t recommend too many desktop activities for preschoolers, my children did enjoy doing simple mazes, follow-the-path activities and overlapping lines when they were at preschool age.

These printable visual motor worksheets are ideal for preschoolers.

tracing paths is good for eye-hand coordinationTracing paths is good for eye-hand coordination

To make the most out of each worksheet, I had my kids go over each path several times, with a different color each time, and gave a star to the color that stayed in the path the best!

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Visual Perception Activities

Good visual perceptual skills will help your child distinguish between letters, and will help them when learning the correct letter formations. This is an important part of preschool handwriting.

I cover visual perception quite extensively elsewhere on my site, so follow my links below to view a whole range of free visual perception activities that are easy to implement using regular household objects.

visual memory activities are important for preschoolersA Visual Memory Activity
  • Form Constancy Activities will help your child remember that a letter or number is still the same, no matter where it is seen or what the font is.

  • Visual Closure Activities will help your child learn to recognize numbers and letters even when they are smudged or partially covered.
a simple visual closure activityA Simple Visual Closure Activity

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Fine Motor Activities

Develop your preschooler’s hand strength and dexterity to get those little hands ready and primed to control a pencil and write neatly!

Even if your child already knows how to hold and use a crayon fairly well, you still need to provide lots of opportunities for those little fingers to get stronger and more mobile.

There are 4 essential bases to developing fine motor skills and none of them involve drawing and coloring at preschool level!

  • Try Some Playdough Activities!
    Don't just give your child a blob of dough and leave them to play with cookie cutters - show your child some specific techniques that will strengthen little hands and fingers as well as work on some coordination skills.
playdough activities are important for preschoolersPlaydough Activities

If you want to know whether your preschooler's pencil grasp is appropriate or not, then check out my page on pencil grasp development.

These free pages of my site will give you lots of fun, easy activities you can do at home and helpful info!

playdough activitiesPlaydough Activities
fine motor activitiesFine Motor Activities
hand strengthening activitiesHand Strengthening
all about fine motor skillsFine Motor Skills

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Cutting with Scissors

Cutting with age-appropriate scissors is a great way to strengthen little hands and get them ready for preschool handwriting!

If the child holds the scissors correctly, it will also help the tripod fingers (the fingers that hold the pencil) to learn to work together well. I don't think preschoolers can ever do too much scissor cutting!

cutting with scissors is important for preschoolScissor Cutting Activities

If you are unsure of how to help your preschooler learn to master scissors, then check out these pages of my site to help you get started:

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Visual-Motor Integration Activities

Visual-motor integration activities will help your preschool child to develop the skills needed for correctly perceiving and then copying shapes numbers and letters.

However, preschool handwriting lessons should include lots and LOTS of practice in tracing and copying simple shapes before any number or letter formations are attempted.


the importance of visual-motor integrationWhy visual-motor integration is important

Working On VMI With Shapes

Many preschool programs introduce just one shape a week.

Start with circles then progress to squares and rectangles, then to triangles and diagonal lines. Lastly teach intersecting lines (upright cross, diagonal cross).

Use a large surface (such as a blackboard, outside wall, sandpit) and draw a simple shape. Have your child trace over the shape a few times.

(The child in the picture had very poor fine motor skills and struggled with the small chalk, so I replaced it with sidewalk chalk soon after taking the photo.)

tracing is an important preschool activityTracing a shape

Give your child lots of opportunities to trace the shape in different mediums:

For example: use bath crayons in the bath, shaving cream on the tiles, sidewalk chalk outdoors, or draw in the sand. In this way, kids who struggle to use a pencil or a crayon can use their fingers or a small sponge to trace over your shape and get satisfaction in this way.

trace around shapes to build VMI skillstracing around a cut-out shape
trace around shapes to build VMI skillstracing around a cut-out shape

If your child has been practicing cutting, a nice idea is to cut out simple shapes, paste them on a background and then trace around them as shown above.

Remember, first give lots of practice tracing and then let your child try drawing the shape on his/her own.

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My Child Has Poor Fine Motor Skills. How Can I Help My Child Learn To Write?

I have often worked with children who have very poor fine motor skills and who therefore hate working with crayons and pencils, and the parents are often worried about their child falling behind in learning basic pre-writing skills while I am working on the fine motor delays.

The trick is to realize that preschool handwriting is all about mastering the shapes, diagonals and intersecting lines that will lead to later letter formation. So all the parents need to do is to give their child lots of opportunity to practice those skills using other ways!

tracing in the sand is a fun pre-writing skill for preschoolTracing in the sand
tracing over letters with a finger helps develop pre-writing skillsTracing with a finger

If you can draw the shape and have the child trace it with their fingers, that would be wonderful for a child who struggles to manipulate a tool.

You can do this on a blackboard or outside wall with chalk, with shaving cream in the shower, with sand on a tray.

You can also use little cloths or sponges: have your child use a wet sponge and then a dry sponge to trace along a chalk outline, or a dry sponge/cloth to trace along a path made by a whiteboard marker.

tracing simple shapes is a good pre-writing skillTracing with a wet sponge

I highly recommend the multi-sensory resources from Handwriting Heroes#Ad to learn letter formations correctly, once your child has mastered shapes and diagonal lines.

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What About Actual Preschool Handwriting?

Although I firmly believe handwriting should not be pushed at the preschool age, many parents need to figure out how to help their preschooler write when the pressure is on from an accelerated preschool program or from more advanced peers.

So here is an overview of my advice:

  • Implement the ideas on this page to develop the essential foundations for preschool handwriting.

  • If your child is learning to write his/her name, try and keep it “big” – blackboards, sidewalk chalks, sandpits - to avoid your child hunching up over a piece of paper before the fine motor skills are ready. Try my fun letter formation activities!

  • And make sure the correct letter formations are used from the start! 

It is very, very hard to unlearn poor letter formations! If your child must learn to write his or her name, make sure the formations are correct. It saves a lot of handwriting headaches later.

Ask your child's teacher for help if you are unsure of how your child should be forming letters or check out Handwriting Heroes#Ad for their awesome way of teaching correct letter formations, using a multi-sensory approach that kids love!

best resources to teach letter formation and handwritingTeach correct letter formations

I hope this page on preschool handwriting has been helpful to you and has inspired you to build solid foundations for your child’s school career!

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