Effective Preschool Alphabet Activities – Beginning Writing Activities

Preschool Beginning Writing Activities:

Preschool Writing Book

The preschool beginning writing activities forms an integral part of all preschool children's school readiness preparation program.

Writing Preparation.

Alphabet Letter Format (Letter of the Week, for example:, "A a" and Number Format 0 - 9.)

Perceptual integration should take place to ensure optimal learning. Learning is an integrated process, no learning entity functions on it's own.

The children should therefore do gross motor shoulder strengthening exercises in order to have more control overtheir pencil grip, and other writing preparation activities.

Eye-hand-co-ordination exercise will be the next important entity to focus on when preparing preschooler children for writing. Visual exercises are part of writing preparation.

Materials:

2. Finger - and Hand Exercises.
3. Objects for various fine motor exercises, for example, clay, sheets of newspaper, stress balls, clothes pegs, elastic bands, beads, and so on.
4. Worksheets.
5. Triangular Shaped Profile Pencils (to improve the child's grip.)

Procedure:

• Fine Motor Exercises for Fingers and Hands:
• While seated ask the children to take their stress balls into their left hands and squeeze the stress balls as hard as they possibly can and hold it down for at least 10 counts. The teacher should increase the numbers daily.
• The teacher should let the children shake out their fingers, and repeat the squeezing of the stress balls with the left hand. Repeat 5x.
• The children will place the stress balls into their right hands, and repeat the same process with their right hands.
• Eye Exercises:
• The children will remain seated at their desks and will place their hands at arm's length, about two feet apart with thumbs up. The children should hold their heads still, and move only their eyes from the left thumb to the right thumb.
• The exercize should be repeated several times, and varied with other eye exercises on a daily basis.
• The teacher will introduce the letter formation of the new letter or number, for the week.
• The teacher will demonstrate how the letter should be formed. The children will "write" the letter in the air, copying the teacher.
• The children will then "walk" the letter which the teacher drew on the carpet with chalk.
• Next, they should practice writing the letter with finger paint on newspaper.
• The activity will end with the children applying their skills on worksheets.

The ultimate aim of a writing instruction lesson is to ensure that all preschoolers will ultimately have a neat and legible hand writing.

Writing is still is one of the most important tools of communication.

Children who have achieved this goal have a distinct advantageas far as their scholastic progress is concerned.

The preschool teacher will lead preschoolers through the writing preparation process, in order to prepare the preschool child for recognizing, and forming the alphabet letters and numbers correctly.

Preschool children who have been lead and prepared will have a feeling of achievement and their self-esteem will be enhanced.

Other methods may speed up the writing process but often leads to the detriment of the of legibility.

Preschool children still need to follow the steps, from strengthen exercises of the fine motor muscles, to warming up exercises for fingers, before the actual writing preparation lesson takes place.

Exercises develops the preschool child's dexterity, fine muscle control, and eye-hand-co-ordination between the eye, hand and the brain, therefore the teacher must consider the development of the fine motor skills as a very important part of the children's writing preparation.

The following points form a very important part of the preschool child's preparation and should not be over looked.

Teachers should observe carefully, and give the correct guidance.

The correct writing posture:

• The preschool child's feet should be placed flat on the floor, the knees together.
• The preschool child's shoulder should be level and parallel with the desk or writing surface.
• The children should keep their backs straight.
• The children should not be allowed to recline against the desk. The children should keep their heads slightly inclined forward but not to the right or left.
• They children should keep their eyes 3 inches from the writing surface.
• If a child is right handed the inside of the left arm must rest on the edge of the desk with the left hand flat on the desk.

  Position of the work-book: Right handed Preschool Children:

• Their worksheet or workbook should be placed directly in front of the child, with the lower edge of the worksheet or workbook parallel to and level with the writing surface.
• The child should place their left hand flat on the workbook or worksheet, almost in front of the chid's chest. They should move the worksheets or books upwards, as their pages fill.

A left handed child should sit to the left of a right-handed preschool child to ensure that their writing "elbows" are not next to each other and therefore cannot impede their movements while writing.

Writing Equipment:

• In the preschool phase a wide variety of equipment is being used; items like sandboxes, paint, crayons, newspapers,are all easily obtainable and will form an important part of their writing preparation activities.
• The children need to develop a feel for the different textures and therefore need to work with textures.
• They should use their fingers to write in the air, to practice their skills.
• They should start their actual writing with soft triangular shaped profile pencils. The triangular shape profile pencils will ensure the preschool children a more functional pencil grip.

• The pencil should rest between the three points, namely the thumb, the middle finger, and the tip of the first finger.
• The children's fingers, wrists, and forearm muscles should be relaxed, while they are writing.
• The left handed preschoolers should place their pencils between their fingers in the same position as the right handed preschool children, except the left handed children should hold their pencils a little further from the point.