VIDEO: Prewriting Skills for Your Preschoolers

Video Transcript

Hello. My name is Weezie Phelan, and I am a pediatric occupational therapist here at the Brooks Rehab Clinic in Mandarin.

Today, I’m going to be discussing pre-writing skills and ways to set up success with your child before they start kindergarten. There’s a progression of shapes that a child needs to be able to copy before they can start handwriting. And when a child masters these shapes, they are ready to start forming letters.

These shapes progress in this order, vertical line, horizontal line, circle, cross, square, right and left diagonal, X, and finally a triangle.

When your child is able to copy a triangle correctly, that means that they are developmentally ready to do handwriting. And this skill is developmentally appropriate at five years and three months old.

So ways you can work on this at home is playing with Play-Doh, making the shapes out of Play-Doh, tracing them in a sensory bin. These are all things that are going to help develop the hand muscles in order to hold a writing utensil and help develop their visual motor skills in order to be able to form these shapes, as well as letters when the time is right.

For more healthy living tips, visit our YouTube Playlist.