These are just a few activities I have used to teach or provide some practice in name writing skills...
Laminate a name card for children to view and reference as they print their name throughout the day without having to constantly ask the teacher for help...
Provide a variety of name printing activities throughout the school year...
Pick one idea at a time to let children try out and practice...
Although I am showing each idea on one piece of paper - I don't present all the different forms of name writing practice (like those shown above) to the children at one time.
Shown above..
1. Print child's name and child traces over it.
2. Make boxes to form the shape of the child's name and child fills in each box.
3. Print child's name and child uses three or four colors to rainbow trace the name.
4. Print first letter only and child finishes the name.
5. Print every other letter and leave a blank line for child to fill in the missing letters of the name.
Write in Upper and Lower case letters...
Teach children from the very beginning to use Upper Case letter to begin the name and all lower case letters to complete the name. Don't teach name writing in all capital letters!
Print name in upper left hand corner of paper...
Teach children to start with the pencil or crayon placed on the left side of the paper. This helps children learn to print from left to right. It also helps prevent children from printing their name backwards as shown above.Here is a great idea from Mom Tried It for helping preschoolers hold a pencil properly...
5 comments:
Wonderful article! My son has difficulty with vision (convergence insufficiency) and working on handwriting was and still can be tearful, but very important activity!
We also like the printable worksheets from http://tools.atozteacherstuff.com/handwriting/handwriting-practice.html
(Because I do NOT have that beautiful early childhood teacher handwriting!)
I have an embarrassing confession, Deborah . . . I haven't used lower case letters in years! In high school I took a lot of drafting classes and one of the skills we worked on was "lettering," which in architecture is traditionally all caps. I loved the way it looked and never went back.
This is a real weak area for me!
Tom, Tom, Tom - I am shaking my head:)
Great name ideas! My daughter is still a toddler so she isn't starting to write yet but I try to incorporate name activities whenever I can. I always use the correct upper/lowercase letters. I've heard that others start out using all capitals because kids can recognize and write them easier. But I figured it might be a bad habit to break, so I might as well show her the "right" way from the beginning. I am going to keep all of these ideas in mine for when she is older :)
Love the name puzzle, I am going to do that with my 3 year old on Monday. Check out http://twistynoodle.com/ for worksheets that you customize. You can change the text to your child's name, and the font to D'Nealian, block, or cursive.
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