Set your preschooler up for writing success with these cute owl back to school themed trace in the path cards for fine motor pre-writing practice! Use them as a print and play, no-prep activity or laminate them for repeated use with your preschooler.
These prewriting practice tracing pages will help your child develop their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination as they trace along the path. These owl themed pages feature a small arrow on the bottom left corner of each card to reinforce left to right order for reading and writing
These prewriting practice pages are perfect for homeschool preschool, preschool classrooms, therapy clients, or anytime learning fun. Your child can use them with their favorite marker, a finger, play dough, or even small manipulatives. No matter how you decide to use them, I hope your little learner enjoys!
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What are prewriting skills?
Simply put, prewriting skills are all skills that your child needs to learn before s/he can write comfortably and confidently.
Prewriting skills help your child hold and use a pencil correctly and comfortably, draw, color, and copy shapes.
Your child definitely will not know how to hold a pencil correctly the first time they pick one up. Or the second time or even the one hundredth time. These are difficult skills to master. Your child will be working on them for several years.
Demonstrate a correct pencil grasp, but don’t worry if your child isn’t doing it “right.” Your child can even use a finger to trace the lines if they aren’t ready for a pencil or crayon yet.
The arrow on each card reinforces the important left to right order of reading and writing in English and many other languages. My daughter is working on her left to write order so the arrows really help her.
There are many play-based ways to build and reinforce prewriting skills:
- Threading and lacing activities
- Hole punching activities
- Playing with play dough (check out these alphabet play-dough mats for a recipe you can make at home!)
- Using scissors
- Using tongs and large tweezers with manipulatives
- Drawing and coloring
- Tracing
- Making crafts
- Building with blocks
- Using fine motor trays to write in cornmeal, sand, etc.
- Tearing paper
- Using stickers
- And more!
These back to school owl themed prewriting trace in the page paths can help keep your child engaged, learning, and having fun. They’re helpful for homeschool preschool parents, classroom literacy centers, and therapists. The sheets can be cut into cards or used as a full page. Make them reusable by laminating the pages or slipping them into page protectors.
Don’t worry – any fuzziness or blurriness in the preview images is a result of image compression to help this page load more quickly. The printable PDFs are crisp and high resolution.
How to print and use trace in the path prewriting pages
This set of school owl themed tracing pages has a total of 16 paths to trace. Some of the paths are easy the straight line and simple curves, and some of them are more challenging. It’s fine if your child can’t do them all perfectly on their first attempt.
Materials needed:
- Free owl trace in the path printables. Download information is located lower in the post. Look for the big rectangle image that reads “click here to download.” There are purple arrows pointing at it to make it easier to find.
- Paper and a printer.
- I recommend 32 lb bright white paper. To see the difference this paper makes, stop by this post on the best paper for printables.
- Laminator, dry erase pockets, or page protectors. Optional.
- I use my inexpensive home laminator because it saves me the time and hassle of going to a copy center (with a young child in tow…)
- Instead of dry erase pockets, I recommend “secure” page protectors. They cost less and are easy to organize in a binder.
- Scissors or paper cutter, if you want to make tracing strips.
- A guillotine style cutter is better for cutting laminated pages, but I usually use my paper trimmer.
- Binder rings, optional for an easy go-bag activity or less mess at home.
- Crayons, pencils, markers, etc. for tracing
- Pencils and crayons are great for single use pages. We use Honeyscticks beeswax crayons because the colors are easy to see and they’re pure beeswax.
- Instead of a dry erase marker, try Stabilo Woody wax crayons. They’re a wax crayon that you can use instead of a dry erase marker. They’re fantastic because there’s no ink and no stink.
- Your child can fill the path with small manipulatives, like pompoms, using a pair of plastic tweezers.
- Your child can also just use their finger for tracing.
How to use trace in the path prewriting cards
1. Grab your download from lower down in the post. Look for the purple arrows and the “click here to download” button.
2. Print the pages you want.
3. Laminate the pages or place them in page protectors. This step is optional, but makes the pages reusable.
4. Cut the pages into cards, if you’re making cards. You can also leave them as whole sheets. To make an easy go bag activity, hole punch one corner on each strip and place them all on a binder ring. You can see these Easter trace in the path pages cut into cards in the image below:
The large wood pencils in the photo above are Stabilo Woodies. They are awesome for laminated activities. Unlike markers, they don’t have ink to leak and they don’t smell bad. See Woodies in action in this post with free printable dinosaur coloring pages.
5. Show your child how to use the tracing paths, if this activity is new for them. You can start by tracing from left to right with your index finger, or you can jump straight to using a marker/crayon. Each rectangle has an arrow in the bottom left corner as a reminder to trace from left to right.
If you want a new activity to keep your child’s attention, you can have your child place manipulatives to fill the path instead of tracing inside. You can use nature treasures like sea shells, pompoms, balls of play dough, mathlinks cubes, etc. You can also encourage fine motor skills by having your child make long “snakes” of play dough to cover each path with.
Free printable back to school owl tracing path download
Like all free preschool printables on The Artisan Life, these are licensed for personal and single classroom use. You are welcome to use them with Scouts groups, home school co-ops, personal therapy clients, etc.
You are not licensed to redistribute or sell the files or printouts to others for their personal use. Instead, please send your friends and coworkers to this page so they can download their own copies.
If you agree to these terms of use, click below:
Be sure to grab these additional free printables to help keep your little learner busy and learning, screen free:
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