On the quest to find activities for your kids that are both fun and educational, tracing checks both boxes. It’s easy for you, fun for them, and promotes literacy and learning. What more could you ask for?
Starting kids on the journey toward reading and writing is simple. Print off some printable alphabet tracing worksheets from PDF and guide them through the first few. You can use this time to work on identifying letters and sounds. Make it fun by using crayons or colored pencils to add some color, and give stickers as an easy reward.
(RDNE Stock project/pexels)
Before long, they will be tackling the worksheets themselves, and with practice and consistency, they will be on the road to reading and writing.
Beyond learning the letters themselves, tracing has some pretty significant benefits for childhood development. So, while it seems as though they are simply learning their ABCs, they are actually learning so much more. Let’s take a look at five of the benefits of tracing letters:
1. Build a Strong Foundation For Handwriting
Tracing is often a child’s first exposure to writing. When they have consistently traced properly formed letters, writing independently becomes easier. They will have more confidence and better handwriting.
Before you know it, your child will write complete words and sentences, and tracing will provide the proper foundation for developing these skills.
2. Develop Fine Motor Skills
Your child’s brain is learning how to connect the signal their brain sends their body to execute precise movements. These fine motor skills become more refined with practice and are crucial to their development. Tracing provides the perfect example of how to help them develop these skills.
Tracing letters is a great way to train their bodies to execute small movements. Gripping the pencil, pushing it on the paper, and following the lines are all ways that your child can develop their fine motor skills.
With consistent exposure to tracing, kids will develop the muscles that are necessary to control a pencil and figure out how to work their muscles, nerves, and joints in tandem to make straight and curved lines. Forming letters takes time and repetition, but their coordination will improve the more they do it.
3. Enhance Brain Development
Your child’s brain is growing every day, and you get the opportunity to expose them to things that will help them learn. When you do an activity like tracing, you allow them to learn several critical things. They will be problem-solving as they follow the tracing lines and learn to follow steps in a sequence to form a letter.
All of the things they learn and experience shape how their minds work. They will apply these principles to other problems they encounter as they move through their day. Small kids are starting to piece together some of the order that exists in their world, and the alphabet can be a great tool to reinforce what they are learning.
4. Improve Concentration
Concentration takes practice! Sometimes when a child starts tracing letters, they are only interested for a few minutes. With time and practice, they may be able to increase how long they can focus on the task.
When kids are excited about a task, it creates a better environment for them to concentrate. As kids practice tracing their letters, they become proud of the progress they have made and excited for the day they can write letters without using the tracing lines or even use their letters to form words. As their interest grows, they will concentrate for longer periods of time, which will translate to other areas of their life.
5. Increase Spatial Awareness
Preschoolers are discovering how they fit into the world. Spatial awareness is how kids figure out the amount of space their body takes up in the world, and it’s fascinating to watch.
Simple things like how far to reach their arms for the pencil to write on paper, how far away from the table to sit, and how far they need to push the pencil to stay within the lines are all things an adult knows instinctively. But this is because we learned them as children as we came to understand spatial awareness. Tracing is a fantastic way to help them understand this complex part of development.
As a bonus, tracing letters will build a child’s confidence and creativity. Kids are so proud when they achieve something new. Every time they practice tracing letters, they will get better. Your kid will feel like a million bucks when they can show you how much they improve. Eventually, they will turn their skills into reading and writing, but it all starts with tracing.
When is your child ready to start tracing letters? When they can hold a pencil, they are ready to try. Some kids are ready as early as three, but typically, around four or five years old, they will developmentally be ready to start forming letters. During these formative years, you can work on letters with them daily.
As they grow older and write independently, you can revisit tracing to help them remember how to form letters properly and improve handwriting. You can keep them interested by introducing cursive letter printables or number tracing worksheets.
Encouraging your kids to trace is a huge gift to them that will help them be successful readers and writers down the road.
