Learning to write alphabet

Teaching Preschoolers to Write Letters At Home – Blue and Hazel

Are you wondering how to teach your preschooler to write letters of the alphabet? You can do it! We do this as part of our homeschool preschool and continue practicing for homeschool kindergarten.

Maybe your child is already scribbling down nonsense and calling them letters? That’s a good sign they are ready for more. I’ll share what we’ve done/are doing and my kids’ ages. Each one has been on their own timeline, and I think it’s important not to push that too much.

Writing starts way before letters are formed (think coloring/scribbling), and it will continue to be perfected long after preschool. Writing letters is a process that takes lots of practice! Hopefully this post gives you the confidence to start helping your child learn to write their name and the whole alphabet.

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What age do kids learn to write letters?

Personally, I’m a fan of waiting till at least age 4 or 5 to begin learning to write letters. But it really depends on your kids eagerness to begin.

My oldest son learned at age 5.5 ,my daughter was ready by age 4, and my 3rd (a boy) is 4.5 and just starting to show signs he is ready. I’ll probably wait with him till he turns 5 because there is NO RUSH.

If anything, starting too soon and expecting too much too soon can put some serious negative pressure on them when they just aren’t ready yet. I’ve learned this the hard way. Instead, focus on hand strength and coordination through coloring, legos, drawing, and Play Doh.

Learning to write all the letters in their first and last name is one of my goals by the end of our homeschool preschool. Kids begin to do a lot more writing in Kindergarten so it is helpful if they can write some letters by then.

Signs that your child is ready to learn to write letters

Before a child learns to write, they are going to come to the conclusion that letters have meaning.

They see it in books, when you write, on road signs, through shows and apps, and through seeing their name on everything.  If you feel unsure if your preschooler is ready to write, ask yourself:

• Can they recognize letter names when they see them?
• Are they interested or asking how to write a letter? That was my hint!
• Do they pretend to write making scribbles or symbols for their “letters”?
• Do they know how to hold a pencil correctly from drawing and coloring?
• Are they experimenting trying to write letters in their name, even if it’s upside down and backwards?

I love this post on the stages of learning to write and draw. You will be able to see what stage your child is at and if they are developmentally ready!

How to teach a preschooler to write letters

Once your preschooler can recognize certain letters, it will make teaching writing easier. They’ll know what it is supposed to look like, and be familiar with it’s name and general appearance.

I tell everyone to use Busy Toddler’s Playing Preschool for a fun and worksheet free way to do preschool at home. It’s my favorite route to exposing them to the alphabet, songs, books, and more. Each day is short and mapped out for you! Here’s my full review on Busy Toddler’s preschool curriculum.

But to teach letters, I like to casually show them “their special letter”, which is the first letter of their name. Point out letters on cereal boxes and coloring books. Here are a few ways I like to begin teaching them to write letters at home.

1. Do TONS of pre-writing activities before attempting to write letters.

As preschoolers get older, they go from making marks on paper to being able to make circles and lines (or round faces with stick legs)!

Eventually, they can also draw shapes like triangles that use tilted lines. My favorite prewriting booklet is the purple Doodle booklet by The Good And The Beautiful. My kids both loved it. In fact, my reluctant oldest child even enjoyed doodling with this, after we backed off of formal handwriting. I saw he wasn’t ready and needed more hand coordination and strength!

2. Strengthen their hands

Anything that works on fine motor skills will help with hand writing later on, like:

• Drawing
• Coloring
• Tracing straight lines, tilted lines, and shapes like circles
• Painting
• Threading fruit loops
• Do A Dot Letter Stamping
• Drawing in salt, dirt, sand, or flour
• Using scissors
• Picking up pom pom balls with tongs
• Tracing fingers over glitter glue letters

3. Show them how to write the letters using sensory activities

Sensory letter writing is a fun way to make letters without having to use a pencil and paper yet. Think forming letters in the dirt or sand.

They can learn the motions and it’s fun! It’s helpful for kids to see you forming a letter, and to have an example to look at. Note that just because they watched you write the letter B top to bottom doesn’t mean they’ll think to do it that way.

There are lots of fun ways to get preschoolers to start forming letters on their own! Some I’ve seen are:

• Forming letters out of shaving cream or sprinkles in a pan.
• Write out a letter with glue and let your kid place noodles or beans on the glue.
• Bath paint on the wall writing out the letter with their finger

3. Write on blank paper

Since kids tend to start out writing BIG letters, I’ve found it’s easier to start on one letter at a time on a large blank piece of paper.

I usually write out the uppercase or lowercase letter somewhere on the blank paper so they have an example to look at. They can take a different colored marker and trace over your letter.

4. Trace letters on paper

Practicing on lined tracing paper teaches them to pay attention to proportions within the lines, and it’s what they’ll be using in kindergarten.

This is a tracing notebook we have used.  I like this book because the letters are already there to trace, which saves me from having to make a ton of dotted letters by hand.  And, the first page of each letter has arrows and numbers to show the hand strokes.

A lot of lined notebooks have just one letter for kids to trace and a bunch of blank lines for them to fill in the letter by memory. These are too advanced to start with, because they haven’t had enough practice yet to remember the motions.

My son needed to trace at least 10 of the same letter before really being able to draw it from memory. If blank lined paper is all you have, then you can fill in letters by hand. I dotted in one full line of capital B and one line of lowercase b.

Or, write the letters for them in pencil and have them trace over them with a marker.

A printable tracing workbook designed to be used side by side with the “Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons”

Update January 2020: We recently tried these new printable letter tracing pages with 100 pages of practice with my 4. 5 year old.

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Teach preschoolers to write their name

If you want to motivate your preschooler to write, then start with fun ways to teach them the letters in their name! 

Kindergarten classes like to have kids able to write their name coming into kindergarten with the first letter being a capitol and the rest of their name in lowercase.

I found these awesome FREE printable name tracing worksheets and loved how easy it was to customize the font, size, you can even save the file to print over and over, or just bookmark the page.

We also love these dry erase letter tracing cards! They come in uppercase and lowercase. Note that if your child has two of the same letters in their name these ones only come with one of each.

Be encouraging

While it’s easy to want your kid to do it right (and I do think the  hand strokes are important), handwriting takes A LOT of practice. If they feel criticized and corrected instead of encouraged, they could easily be too frustrated to keep going.

I tried to use phrases like “That’s almost it! Make sure the b touches the middle line next time” or “Good start! Now try again making the loop a little more round.” I found encouragement worked better for my son (who gets discouraged easily) rather than saying, “don’t do that” or “the loops aren’t round enough.”

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Should you start with uppercase or lowercase letters?

Don’t worry too much about this.

Some people start with all uppercase letters first and lowercase letters second, since uppercase letters are a bit easier.

It’s a good time to introduce that names are always spelled with a capital letter if that’s new to your preschooler. It’s also good when reading out loud to make the connection that every sentence starts with a capital letter.

Just want a handwriting curriculum?

I hope you see that for preschool level…you truly can teach your kid to write their name and learn to form letters.

But if you are like me and want something you can whip out once a day to practice that’s planned out for you…we are LOVING Handwriting Without Tears. It’s a SOLID program used by homeschoolers and in elementary schools.

This is their pre-k version called Kickstart Kindergarten. We buy the workbook and chalkboard. Nothing else, and you don’t need the teacher’s guide.

DO buy their official chalkboard and a pack of chalk snapped into 1 inch pieces. The smaller pieces encourage proper grip, and the chalkboard helps them write the BIG version of the letter and focus on which stokes come first.

Then, using a tiny sponge cut up, they’ll erase it using the same chalk strokes getting to form the letter twice.

We are now using Handwriting Without Tears as our main way to teach letter formation

I actually am having my now 1st and 2nd grader go back and do the kindergarten and 1st grade levels.

Somehow they’d slipped into some wonky habits and were doing a lot of bottom to top letters, which isn’t great for neatness or speed or cursive later on.

They do 1-2 pages a day. The orange kindergarten book was so easy for my 1st grader she flew through it in 1 month. The boxes and letters are larger in that book than the 1st grade book. And there’s more repetition for each letter.

I feel good knowing they are reviewing letter formation, and it’s helping me to teach them things like bumping the top line and bottom line. Plus, I’m loving the memorable phrases like “Frog jump” for letters you have to pick up your pencil. Or “Magic c” for letters that begin with that curve.

I’ll probably gently introduce my 4.5 year old to letter tracing letters this year using sensory bins and play…and start him on Kick Start Kindergarten next year around age 5 or 5.5 towards the end of preschool. He has to be ready though, or I’ll wait. Sometimes preschool is just too early, especially for boys!

Handwriting mistakes to avoid

Sometimes kids are capable but uninterested.

My philosophy is that if they are not interested, but capable, I don’t force it unless it’s something I deem necessary. I want my kids to be writing letters by Kindergarten (age 5.5-6). But, if they are 4 and uninterested, then wait 6 months and try again!

The majority of writing begins in the Kindergarten years anyway.

Doing worksheets before any pre-writing activities.

If they are interested in letters but can’t seem to follow directions to trace or copy, then back up and do some fun pre-writing activities.

I didn’t realize that “pre-writing” was an official thing, because kids naturally do some of these things first. Think drawing shapes and lines (my 3.5 year old currently draws mama as a big round circle with about 5 lines of hair).

Also coloring, holding a paintbrush, beading, drawing letters in the air, or anything that strengthens hand muscles and makes writing easier later on is considered pre-writing.

It can be a lot more work to correct a bad habit than to make sure they learn the strokes correctly the first time. I’m living this. You can’t hand them a worksheet and walk away. You’ll have to stay at watch till a habit is formed.

One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen all my kids try to do is write from bottom to top.

Some examples are writing the letter O starting at the bottom instead of top, or my son wanting to write the tail of the lowercase “g” in his name before circle on top.

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How to teach a left handed child to write

My oldest is a clear lefty and my middle is a righty. There is not a huge difference when teaching them to write letters, so don’t be too intimidated!

• Make sure they have a proper pencil grip. I have them pinch the pencil with their thumb and index finger, resting the pen on their middle finer.
• Hold the pencil close to the tip for better control, but far enough away that they can still see what they are writing without having to bend their wrist all wonky.
• Tip the paper a tad, so the bottom right corner of the page is bit down. This is opposite of the way I tilt my page being right handed.

This is an excellent in depth post on Tips for teaching left handed kids to write if you want to read more.

You can teach your child to write at home

If you are beginning your homeschool journey and feel overwhelmed, know that you have what it takes to teach your child to write their letters! Homeschoolers have the freedom to go at their own pace, and it’s a great way to spend one on one time with your child. 

If your child will be attending kindergarten, then there will be PLENTY of letter practice there. Or, consider doing kindergarten at home! Kindergarten teachers know that some kids can write many letters and others only some or none at all.  They really try to meet kids where they are at!

Either way, helping your child to learn their letters at home will help them so much! What is one thing you worry about when it comes to teaching handwriting? Let me know in the comments!

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Learning to write the alphabet

Learning to write the alphabet is one of the first stages of writing literacy. For early modern English children, this meant first learning to read the letters of the alphabet (printed in black letter) from a hornbook.

They then learned to write the letters of the alphabet in one or both of the two main handwritten scripts, secretary and italic. For this, they relied on manuscript or printed copybooks or exemplars, usually supplemented by instruction from a writing master at a writing school, a private tutor or family member, or usher in a grammar school. ¹

Below are two plates from Jehan de Beau-Chesne’s and John Baildon’s A booke containing diuers sortes of hands, as well the English as French secretarie with the Italian, Roman, chancelry & court hands (London, 1602 [first ed. 1570]) (Folger STC 6450.2) that depict versions of secretary and italic hand:

On both of these leaves, someone has tried to imitate the letter forms. In the top example, the brand new writer got through some of the minuscule and majuscule forms of the letter A (“a a a A A [upside down!] a a a”) before smudging out his or her work. Further progress is made on the “Italique hande” leaf, where the letters A through J (and perhaps an attempt at the letter K) are awkwardly and painstakingly formed underneath the exemplar. ²

Children learned their letters by repeatedly tracing and copying strokes, letters, alphabets, pangrams (sentences that contain all the letters of the alphabet), and aphorisms. Beau-Chesne’s copybook was not the only one to contain the verse instructions, “Rules made by E.B. for children to write by,” that describe the ideal quill, ink, and posture for a child’s first experiences with writing. The instructions even advise on how the teacher should prepare the paper:

… Scholler to learne, it may do you pleasure,
To rule him two lines iust of a measure:
Those two lines betweene to write very iust,
Not aboue or below write that he must:
The same to be done is best with blacke lead,
Which written betweene, is cleansed with bread.
Your pen from your booke, but seldome remoue,
To follow strange hand with drie pen first proue: (copied from Folger STC 6450.2)

That is, use a graphite pencil to rule a piece of paper with sets of double lines for the child to write between. Then write some exemplar letters for the child to copy. He or she can trace them with an inkless quill in the first instance, and then proceed to use ink. The pencil lines can be erased with bread.

The result might be something like below, in which one Stephen Poynting, possibly a student at the Free School in Gloucester, practices a pangram, “Job a Righteous man of uz waxed poor Quickly” (i/j and u/v counting as single graphs). He writes it twenty-one times, and his spacing between words grows larger and larger so that he can no longer fit the last word of the sentence (he appears to be writing one word of the sentence at a time, in columnar format). If you look closely at the piece of paper, you can see that it is blind-ruled; that is, guidelines have been made with an inkless quill to help him write in a straight line.

In two competing pamphlets printed within weeks of each other in 1591, the early writing masters William Panke and Peter Bales provide detailed instructions for learning to write the letters of the alphabets in terms of breaks (the individual strokes that make up each letter) and joins (the strokes required to connect letters to each other if one is writing in secretary hand). ³ Breaking and joining instruction disappeared from copybooks in the first half of the seventeenth century, but was revived by Edward Cocker in the 1650s.

The example below shows how one Thomas Robinson, in 1698, used Cocker’s plate of “The Breakes of sett Secretary Letters” as a worksheet, completing the unfinished letters in ink, and making it up to the letter K in his imitation of the sample alphabet at the bottom of the leaf.

The number of surviving copybooks from the Elizabethan and Jacobean period is tiny, with scholars assuming that they were genres that were either “used to death” or discarded once they were no longer needed. Most surviving examples of  alphabet practice appear on blank spaces in printed and manuscript books and are usually not noted in catalog records. An advanced search in Hamnet for “alphabet” under “All notes” led to some good examples of what the very earliest attempts at an alphabet look like. ⁴

This notebook from a barrister riding on the Midland circuit in 1610 includes alphabet practice by a member of the Jeffreys family of Acton, Denbighshire, ca. 1650-ca. 1660, on three separate leaves (Folger MS V.a.489). All examples are minuscule secretary letters, except for the initial majuscule A.

Thomas Blakesley’s secretary alphabet, copied in 1613, is slightly more practiced than the previous example. He practices in a heavily annotated copy of Girolamo Ruscelli’s The secretes of the reuerende Maister Alexis of Piemount. Containyng excellente remedies against diuers diseases, woundes, and other accidents, with the manner to make distillations, parfumes, confitures, diynges, colours, fusions and meltynges. … Translated out of Frenche into Englishe, by Wyllyam Warde (London, 1558) (Folger STC 293 copy 2). It is possible that the alphabet of minuscule and majuscule secretary letters was copied and spaced so that a younger learner could practice in between the lines.

Jeremiah Milles has added his alphabets and practice sentences to the backs of the front and rear covers and the endleaves of William Gouge’s Panoplia tou Theou. The vvhole-armor of God or The spirituall furniture which God hath prouided to keepe safe euery Christian souldier from all the assaults of Satan. First preached, and now published for the good of all such as well vse itt (Folger STC 12122 copy 2). His four attempts at the alphabet are either incomplete, or, as in the second example, missing the letter “p.” This causes problems for him in the fourth image, his transcription of Psalm 124 from the King James Bible, where he clearly thinks that the letter “q” is a “p”: see the words “up” (“uq”) and “proud” (“qroud”), for example. And in the third image, Milles’ transcription of the opening lines from John Fell’s The life of the most learned, reverend and pious Dr. H. Hammond (London, 1661), he somewhat corrects his initial confusion, although he still writes “attempted” as “attemqted.”

Another alphabet appears in a Folger copy of the 1605 edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London, 1605) (Folger STC 22543 copy 4), but in this instance it is acting as a key to a rather unsophisticated cipher.

For any of you who have taught young children to write, now is the moment to acknowledge how little has changed in handwriting instruction in the past four hundred years (well, except that early modern children had the added challenges of having to learn to cut a quill nib and make iron gall ink). Worksheets from the Zaner-Bloser handwriting program illustrate the order in which the strokes are made and how the letters are joined together, and provide top, bottom, and middle guide lines. Modern handwriting programs such as Zaner-Bloser, Handwriting without Tears, and the Peterson Directed Method, encourage tracing letters before forming them freestyle, just like “Rules made by E.B. for children to write by” from 1570. ⁵

I happen to live with a four year old who is just learning to write her name and the alphabet. Just like Elizabethan children, she had to learn to grip her pencil correctly, in the “dynamic tripod grasp,” a new-fangled phrase for the second hold on the left, below.

I created double-ruled guidelines for her and an exemplar alphabet. She gamely copied the letters below, after tracing my lightly-written A and B. The results are one of those moments when the early modern and modern worlds seem to collide.

1. See Herbert C. Schulz, “The Teaching of Handwriting in Tudor and Stuart Times,” The Huntington Library Quarterly (4), August 1943: 381-425.
2. By the way, the aphorism on this leaf is from Cicero.
3. Simran Thadani’s recently defended PhD dissertation, Penmanship in Print: English Copy-Books and their Makers, 1570-1763 (University of Pennsylvania, 2013), provides an account of the battle for authority between these two writing masters
4. I’m sure there are many other instances that haven’t yet been recorded, and that if one searched all the examples of “pen trials” under “All notes,” other examples of letter-formation practice would be revealed.
5. Despite the fact that the Common Core Standards no longer require elementary school students in the U.S. to learn cursive handwriting, many states are still opting to include it in the curriculum, and research highlights the many benefits of learning to write (in both print and cursive hands), in terms of cognitive development, motor skills, and reading comprehension. For a good general overview of the debate, see here and here, as well as the recent New York Times debate, “Is Cursive Dead?”

Learning to write block letters of the Russian alphabet.

Electronic library

Raising children, today's parents educate the future history of our country, and hence the history of the world.

- A.S. Makarenko

Learning to write block letters of the Russian alphabet. Trainer

• A
• B
• B
nine0017 G
• D
• E
• Yo
• F ​​
• W
• and
• Y
• K
• L
• M
• H
• O
• P
• R
• C
• T
• W
• F ​​
• X
• C
• H
• W
• W
• b
• S
• b
• E
• Yu
• I
• Tasks
nine0085

This section contains a simulator that teaches preschoolers 5-6 years old how to write the correct block letters of the Russian alphabet. The simulator consists of a collection of developing children's recipes, arranged in alphabetical order on colored tabs.

Red tabs contain copybooks for studying vowels, blue tabs for studying consonants, gray tabs for studying separating marks. The green tab contains developmental tasks and exercises for consolidating and practical application of writing skills in block letters. nine0003

Printing is part of learning to read and write early. This lesson develops attention, fine motor skills, graphic skills, promotes better memorization of the alphabet and improves literacy.

Performing developmental tasks and exercises, the child will get acquainted with block letters, learn how to write them, and also learn the Russian alphabet.

You can print as many copybooks as you need to repeatedly practice writing letters, reinforce your skills, and get a successful learning outcome. nine0003

Here various methods of teaching writing in block letters are proposed, which allows you to individually select the most suitable option for your child or put into practice all the proposed methods, making the learning process more interesting and varied for a preschooler.

Tips for working with spelling:

• Let's learn the vowels first. They are simpler and easier to pronounce and remember, at this stage of learning there are no problems even for children with speech disorders. Letters denoting the same vowel sound are recommended to be studied in pairs A - I, O - E, U - Yu, E - E, Y - I.
• After vowels, we study consonants. The sequence of study does not matter. As a rule, the letter P and other letters, the pronunciation of which is still difficult for the baby, are studied at the end. It is not recommended to study paired consonants in a row (B - P, G - K, D - T, Z - C, V - F, F - W) - it is difficult for a child at this age not to confuse them by ear.
• There are different approaches to the order of learning the letters, so you can use another, in your opinion, the most acceptable variant of the sequence of letters. nine0018
• Practice with your child for no more than 15 to 20 minutes.
• When completing tasks, the preschooler should hold the pen or pencil correctly, without straining the fingers too much.
• It is very important to properly organize the child's workplace: be sure to pay attention to whether it is comfortable for the child to sit at the table, and also where the light source is located. For right-handers, the lamp should be on the left side, and for left-handers, on the right.
• Don't forget to praise your child, even if he doesn't do well on tasks. From classes, a preschooler should receive only positive emotions. This is a prerequisite for further successful learning. nine0018
• Remember that learning should be in the form of an exciting game. In no case should a child be forced to fill out prescriptions - this can consolidate an aversion to learning to read and write for many years.

* Methods V.G. were used to create the simulator. Dmitrieva , O.S. Zhukova , M.O. Georgieva , M.P. Tumanovskaya .

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"The printer is the ass of the computer, because what comes out of it is what the computer has inside" - Gleb, 5 years old

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