Tracing Lines for Pre-Writing Practice

Allowing young learners to practice pre-writing skills is easy with a light table, tracing templates, and small manipulatives! Tracing lines is a step in helping young students understand the mechanics of written language. While participating in tracing lines for pre-writing practice, they can begin to see how written language functions.

Tracing Lines: Not Just for Pencils!

Tracing is typically thought of as taking a pencil, crayon, or marker and following along the lines underneath some paper. But tracing doesn’t have to involve drawing at all! Playing with small manipulatives on top of templates can also help young children to understand how writing works while refining their fine motor skills.

Skills Objectives for Pre-Writing Practice

Pre-writing skills provide opportunities for students to strengthen their fine motor skills so they can hold a pencil to draw, write, and color. Other practical skills include:

Coordination
concentration
moving focus from left to right

tracing lines — In this image, a student traces a zig-zag path with pony beads.

Preschoolers have different levels of fine motor abilities, so it is important to promote experimentation with writing through fun activities like tracing at the light table. Providing opportunities for emergent writers is key in developing their future reading and writing skills.

Tracing Lines as Pre-Writing Activities at the Light Table

The light table is an engaging center to promote writing skills. With its glowing light, simply place table scatter, mini erasers, pom-poms, gems, and the like with line templates and watch the students work their way over to the table to have fun. The tracing lines can be straight, curved, diagonal, zig-zag, or a combination. These lines can be printed on transparency paper or just regular paper. Both options work great on the light table. Start with this free tracing lines template for ideas.