Our Busy Little World
Jan. 27, 2007 - Tracing Letters
Here's the link to the tracing font I mentioned in my last post: http://www.billybear4kids.com/fonts/fonts.htm . The one we use is "Zyia Learns Letters".There are others available - a few more free ones if you do a google search (actually I found all sorts of free pre-k and k stuff online with just changing the search terms), and then of course plenty you can buy. But this one suits our needs perfectly. After you download it (which was very tricky for me to figure out - thankfully my mom knew how to get a file unzipper online for free also, so you might need that like I did), you have to add it into your fonts in the control panel (the Help menu should tell you how). Then you can just use it like any other font in Word or your writing program. I always use it in a pretty large size since Isabelle's just learning. But of course it's really nice to be able to make it smaller as her writing improves. One thing I realized after I started using this is that I could have accomplished basically the same thing by using any normal font, but making it light grey instead of black (kind of like the light crayon strokes to trace in the early Handwriting Without Tears books). But in any case, Isabelle loves it, and she particularly likes "dots" as I made them for her by hand for awhile. The font saves me a lot of time! Some things we use it for are:
I print out a "letter practice" page for whatever letter(s) we're working on, or for any she needs particular practice on. It's amazing - she could not seem to make an "s" before tracing, now she's a pro at them even without the tracing letters.
Isabelle likes to write letters to her grandmas, aunties, etc. She dictates to me what she'd like to say to them, I type it for her and then she actually gets to write the whole letter herself (this works great for her, as she doesn't tire of writing things, so she'll write decently lengthy ones)
Thank you letters - this worked great for these letters after Christmas; once she finished writing all the letters, she got to decorate them how she pleased with stickers, "art" markers, etc.
Helping her learn her name and her sisters' names, or recognize simple phrases like "I love you"
I make up little stories (very simple, like the first BOB books set, but shorter) that I know Isabelle can read the words in. Then she can write them and read them. I started this when I realized Isabelle could read the words in a sentence, but didn't realize they went together to form a (miniature) story. The first one I did was: Cat and dog ran fast. She wrote it, then read it, then I asked her all these questions to help her see that it was a story: what did cat and dog do? who ran fast? how did they run? The light bulb went on for her after that, which was very fun to see! Of course she didn't have to write on tracing letters to figure out the concept of reading a story, but it worked!
You can make any kind of worksheet you'd like with these letters. Maybe paste on pictures (or have the little ones draw the pictures, if they're the artistic sort), then print the letters for the word. Or print a big "A" and a bunch of words which start with "a". Capitals and lowercase, numbers, etc. I don't really have any pre-k worksheets that fit what Isabelle's doing letter-wise (they're either too easy, or not quite what we're working on, etc) and I didn't worry about it as I had no plans to use worksheets in pre-k. But as I have a daughter who LOVES to write and would practically do it all day if I let her, this font is great fun for us!
Comments
Jan. 31, 2007 - Untitled Comment
Posted by tripletsrajoy
Thank you for posting this! I am going to try to make up some worksheets for my kiddos. I like the example you did for Isabelle of the little story. That also might help me.
Feb. 1, 2007 - Great!
Posted by genamayo
What wonderful ideas! Thank you so much,
Gena
Feb. 1, 2007 - Great!
Posted by genamayo
What wonderful ideas! Thank you so much,
Gena
Nov. 19, 2007 - thanks
Posted by Anonymous
I ran across your site when searching for fonts, we are also homeschooling. Thanks for the ideas! Have you read "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons?" We are almost done and it is amazing! Worth a look.
