Simple activities, such as tracing lines and shapes, can build strength and coordination between your toddler’s fingers, hands, and wrists. The more he practices, the better he’ll become at grasping his writing utensil and controlling his movements.
When you give your toddler some straight or zig-zagged lines to trace, he’ll learn the beginning steps for writing letters. Tracing can fine-tune your toddler’s drawing and writing skills to provide him with more refined and coordinated movements he’ll need for handwriting.
Through tracing, your toddler will also learn how to create movements that he can use to draw pictures on his own. Tracing curved lines, for example, will eventually lead to him drawing a curved line on his own, which he can use to make a rainbow.
As a modern parent, one of the few things we struggle with is to teach our kid(s) how to write. With computers, tablets, and phones being the thing mostly used today, it’s difficult to show your children the importance of handwriting even though it is still mandatory. Some parents encourage drawing as it helps develop the skill of holding a pencil correctly. While it is useful to some extent, practicing writing is still very essential for the cognitive development of your child, especially+ the preoperational stage of development.
Good handwriting may develop over time but you, as a parent, can encourage it gradually at home, or even more so if you’re a home-schooler. Children start to develop the ability to hold slimmer pens or pencils later on after the muscles on their little hands have developed.
One piece of advice we generally give to parents is to have their kids work with chunky crayons or chalk on a drawing board initially and then work their way towards paper and pencil. Starting there gives your child to express themselves and befriend the concept of paper and pen as fun. This will motivate them to write in different styles like cursive and regular when they actually have to learn that.
Another huge help comes from tracing books, as it encourages tactile learning. You might have learned from all the research you did when becoming a first-time parent that babies start learning through touch, even before they are born! Yep, amazing isn’t it? And then keep learning through their toddler years and so on.
I quickly learned through research and with my own children that learning through tracing was a lot easier than just reading a letter or number in one book and then writing it in a separate notebook later. Tracing books allows a child to be able to see characters, trace them by following the lines and after a little practice, write those numbers or characters without any help
Tracing books usually have dotted lines, which are either faint or prominent. Some books even have arrows to show the tracing direction. This is to show an easy way to write a certain letter or number. It makes things more interesting and aids your kid to pick up and learn in a fun way.
From a parent’s perspective, and from what a lot of different articles and parental classes teach you, you’ll know that teaching your child a skill is a great way to bond. Observing the ways they develop their skills and from untidy scrawl to acing the first letter, you’ll get the chance to observe them and help them out timely.
Say, a child struggles with writing a certain letter or number, tracing books gives the child a chance to write over and over again and it’ll even look neat, and by neat I also mean accurate. When the thing they’ve written, comes out looking similar to the actual printed text, they’ll feel very confident. They’ll actually start enjoying writing with tracing books as the outcome is so neat and they get praised for it. So do explore different tracing books as it’s very beneficial for your child.
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