Teaching Your Preschooler to Write

We are halfway through our school year here at The Academy and we have been working on teaching our PreK-3 students (preschoolers age 3-4) to write! It’s an exciting time for them. They love to show how proud they are after they successfuly write their names by themselves for the first time. Here are some of the ways we work on teaching our students to write.

1. Let them do things themselves.

​​Let your child butter their own bread, peel oranges (like the Cutie brand oranges), open water bottles, and put on socks. All of these things help to build your child’s hand strength. 

 

2. Use other things.

Try letting your child use a single hole punch, scissors (supervised of course!), play dough, paint, and chalk. This will help with their fine motor skills needed for holding a pencil and writing. Our writing centers are filled with everything from puzzles, to markers and crayons, to play dough! 

 

3. Build with Legos, small blocks, etc..

Building with these things will help with hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills.

4. Unstructed outdoor play.

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Let your child have unstructed play time! They need a strong sense of body awareness to be able to sit in their chair correctly, hold their pencil and their paper, before being able to write. 

 

Learning to write takes time and patience. Keep practicing in new and fun ways with your child!