Preschool Tracing Activities are Important for your Child

Doing preschool tracing activities with your child will teach him or her more than just how to form a number or letter correctly. Tracing also helps your child develop a sense of order for how writing is done, develop his concentration and work on his fine motor skills.

Here is a short video showing a pre-writing, tracing activity from a Montessori classroom. Notice how a child needs to practice tracing on his own, before copying the lines that the teacher drew.

Tracing Activities You Can Do at Home:
Tracing numbers is a great way for preschoolers to begin learning how to form the numerals. All you have to do is simply write the numbers, very darkly on a piece of lined paper, and then tape a piece of tracing paper on top so your son or daughter can trace over your numbers.

Paper-clipping is actually a wonderful fine motor activity for young children, and kids really love to learn how to use the paper clips. (In fact you may never get past the paper clipping to get to the actual writing activity, but that’s OK, too.)

If you’d also like to use an activity book, I highly recommend My First Book of Tracing by the Kumon publishing company. Kumon’s books are really well designed and organized and make sure that a foundation skill is completely mastered before going on to the next skill level.

What To Do if Your Child is not Ready to Trace:
As you begin working on tracing activities with your child, if you notice that your child can’t hold a pencil with a pincer grip, or can’t copy the numbers very well, do not worry. She just needs to work a little more on her fine motor skills.

Bead stringing, lacing cards, coin stacking and even the above-mentioned paper clipping are all great activities to develop fine motor skills.

After a month of two of playing fine motor games, you can introduce tracing again to see if she is now ready.

Fringe Benefits:
Your son or daughter will gain a lot more that prewriting skills from learning how to trace. As your child becomes an accomplished tracer, he will learn the order of writing (top to bottom, left to right), will develop concentration skills to help him in more academic activities and will even enjoy a sense of accomplishment at being an able tracer who can write numbers that other people can read.

Have fun and be creative, but also be diligent, and you will find your child will be ready to write in no time at all.

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