Prewriting with colors can help with writing!
Now, I know, writing and moving your body are not typically seen together. Prewriting with colors is like a little secret mission.
Here, your child is moving left to right, along with seeing lines like straights, zigzags, and curves, just like we form lines and letters. When we prewrite with colors and movement, we help our children make connections to the letters of the alphabet.
RELATED: Love activities that explore color? Me too. Here are 35+ Brilliant Color Activities you’ll adore.
What the hand does, the mind remembers. Maria Montessori
Prewriting with colors gets children moving to learn!
This color activity has so many critical vital concepts.
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Primary colors
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Left to right progression
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Using the term transportation
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Connecting the body to prewriting movements
And it’s not our first rodeo with writing without pencils! You can see we love using magnets, counting bears, and chalk as well.
There are never too many lines you can have in your Breakfast Invitations and late afternoon activities. Show them, touch them, talk about them!
What’s the big idea?
First, Let’s Look at Kindergarten Writing as a Benchmark and See What is Expected:
By Kindergarten, children will use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces, informational/explanatory text, and narration.
Your child will recognize print as a form of communicating ideas.
Now, let’s dive into what’s age-appropriate and the stages of writing.
Your preschooler’s writing will progress over time. Here are four stages of writing as it develops:
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Drawing and Scribbling: Here is where writing development begins. The scribbles and drawings are interchangeable, and children may or may not discriminate between the two.
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Letters and Letter-Like Forms: Here, children begin to write letters they often see and feel most comfortable with. They understand the letter has a name but do not know that it is associated with a sound.
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Beginning Sounds: Here is where preschoolers recognize the sound-to-letter relationships and often use inventive spelling. The first letters in words match with the correct beginning sound.
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Beginning and Ending Sounds: Children begin to write with spaces and have a correct beginning and ending sound when spelling and writing.
To move through the stages, we must offer children various ways to explore lines, curves and tracking their eyes from left to right.
Easy setup for prewriting with colors!
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Rather than Duplos, try counting bears or pom poms.
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Skip felt squares and try construction paper.
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Rather than a dump truck, try a school bus.
Take a look around your home and use something that you can use for a variety of activities.
RELATED: You will see these supplies used again on our Activity Cards.
Setup in a flash!
Use painter’s tape to draw quick and easy lines on the floor.
Then, grab Duplos in primary colors.
Make one line for the red Duplos, one for blue, and one for yellow using painter’s tape. I like to use delicate painter’s tape on my floors.
Set up the “dumping zone” to the right of the activity.
Invite your child to transport the primary colors from left to right following the road. You will likely watch your child sort the colored blocks and then carry this Breakfast Invitation into their own hands.
What happens next is even more magical.
After transporting the colors from left to right, the boys both ran over to grab more Duplos and transportation forms.
How do you get your child to play more?
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Start with small setups, such as Breakfast Invitations, to play through learning.
- Try to build a predictable routine to improve the flow of your day.
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Allow the rhythm of play to develop over time. If you set the stage, you will see momentum grow over time.
When will you prewrite with color?
Great Idea! Thank you!
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