Anyone have some good ideas to teach little ones heading into j/k next year how to start printing? I have invested in all kinds of activity books (tracing letters), but they just seem to scribble & that's it?!
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Anyone have some good ideas to teach little ones heading into j/k next year how to start printing? I have invested in all kinds of activity books (tracing letters), but they just seem to scribble & that's it?!
How old are these children going into j/k? Is it a requirement that they start printing?
I guess what my goal is a start towards writing their name? I do recall looking at the art work from time to time in my oldest son'sQuote:
Originally Posted by samantha3
j/k class and thinking how incredibly well some wrote their names on theirs (my son, not so much?!).
I had only two little girls who could write their names before JK, but none of the boys. I have seriously given up trying to get them to print letters and now I use flashcards all the time for visual recognition of letters, numbers, shapes, colours, etc. but every time I give them letter tracing pages or anything similar they do as you described, just scribbling. Only the two little girls who could print their names also made lovely pictures at age 3/4 too.
I have decided that is a job for the JK teacher!
Phew! That makes me feel better! All of my (older & some of the younger too) are excellent at recognition...but the printing!
My own son who has just turned three knew all of his letters upper and lower case and numbers to 20 by the times he was 2.5...... He says the alphabet, knows his shapes and colors too, now I have a 4 yr old dcg that just started jk in sept and could only write her name but didn't recognize any other letter. Or number. And couldn't print anything other then her name..... I tried and tried and she just cried so I gave up and it's in the parents and teachers hands. Same as another three yr old dcb I have doesn't know any letter or number and doesn't know the difference between the two. So I think my child is not the norm and for the daycare kids.... well not my job!
If they show an interest in printing at that age, great, but if not, don't fret :) Some kids of that age are just more naturally interested in it than others and I don't think it's due to anything that others did to encourage them. Once they are in school they learn so fast too.
Having said that when my son was younger I bought this http://www.crayola.com/browse-produc...ty-center.aspx which he mainly used for scribbling (haha) but I now use it in my daycare as a fun learning tool. I love that it's dry erase and the cards are great.
It took till the summer before school for the boys I had to show any interest at all in a lot of academic stuff even though we had been doing it over and over in just about any way I could think of hoping something might inspire them. They loved to make rainbow names. We would line up the crayons like the rainbow Then I printed their name out in black on a page leaving a bit of space between each letter. Then they started with red and traced over the letters, then orange, etc. Yes it was mostly scribbling by the time they got down and after awhile we stopped at purple so only 5 colours and no black to scribble over everything with. I would do my name too at the same time so they were seeing a visual of what they were supposed to do but if they didn't then so what I still talked about what we were doing. We did that a couple times a week and towards the end of the summer more often and sometimes we reversed the colours so on monday it was red to purple and on wed it was purple to red.
Tracing the letters with their fingers gives tactile reinforcement. Make the letters out of felt or various fabrics and glue to cards for tracing.