Preschool Prewriting Activities You Can Use to Teach Numeral Formation

Preschool prewriting activities are designed to help your child with many fine motor activities including, developing finger grasping and the pincer grip. Once those are in place, your child can work on properly holding a writing utensil, be it chalk, pencil, marker, or crayon.

There are wonderful fine motor developing activities you can do around the home to help your child strengthen his grasp, and learn how to hold a pencil correctly.

Learning to Recognize the Numbers
Before doing any other preschool prewriting activities, your child should learn to recognize the numbers in the world around him or her.

While you’re in the grocery store, or walking down your block play a game with your child and ask. “How many 4’s can you find?” Or “I see seven 0’s, can you find them all?”

When you do find a large “3,” for example, in a book or on a sign, hold your child’s index finger and trace over the number it. Say out loud together, “This is a three.” This is a way to help your child see how to move his hand to form the number three.

If your child is a tactile learner, you might want to try these Tactile Sandpaper Numerals developed by the Montessorians. (Read this article to learn why I love the Montessori materials for teaching math.)

Do your own Montessori numerals lesson at home by tracing your child's fingers over the Sandpaper Numerals, saying the name of the numeral, and then matching up the correct number of objects to each numeral.

Use cars, legos, cheerios or whatever is handy at the moment.

Practice regularly until your child can independently place 5 marbles underneath the numeral 5, 8 marbles underneath the numeral 8, etc.

Do your children play with Thomas the Tank Engine wooden train sets? Learn how children develop strong fine motor and other early math skills when they play with the lovable Thomas the Tank Engine trains!

Preschool Prewriting Activities Using Beans and Glue!
Here’s a great rainy day fine motor activity guaranteed to keep your preschooler occupied, and help him or her get a stronger pincer grip, too!

Simply write some numbers on a piece of construction paper or card stock. You can write your address, your phone number, or just the numbers 0-9 as I did in my example seen in the following photos.

For younger children, or children struggling with fine motor, give them larger beans to work with. As they become more and more able, switch to smaller sized beans to increase the challenge.

Children with better developed fine motor skills may be able to handle smaller items like barleys, colored sprinkles and rice.

You might want to offer the child a variety of beans to use, in order to keep it interesting. I used black-eyed peas, green split peas, popcorn kernels, barley and rice. You may also try cake decorating sprinkles, peppercorns, or lentils to vary the sizes of what’s being used.

Remember, the tinier the object, the more challenging it is to manipulate. You don’t want to frustrate your child by giving him or her beans that are really too small for her to handle.

Give her a mix of some easy and some challenging beans and when she’s mastered those, then try her on the really small stuff like barleys or sprinkes.

If she can write a few of the numbers for you, then you know you’re on the right track!

Keep going with varied preschool prewriting activities that will develop fine motor coordination for better pencil grasping. These can include bead stringing, lacing cards, and tracing the numbers.

With consistent practice your child will be able to form all the numbers correctly!