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JDaniel4s Mom

growing & learning with him

Star-Themed Alphabet Tracing Mats

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Alphabet tracing mats are fun to explore. This set of tracing mats has a star-theme. There are three versions of each letters mat. First, there are uppercase letter mats. Next, there are mats that feature lowercase letters. The final set features both uppercase and lowercase letters.

The star outline can be traced on the dotted line. Each letter can be trace on it’s perimeter or outline. It can aslo be draw or written inside the outline. You can decide what you want your children to do with each letter.

Deciding How to Use the Alphabet Tracing Mats

  • Each mat can be used like a worksheet. Your children can use a writing tool (a pencil, pen, marker, or crayon) to trace the star and the letter .
  • Each mat can be laminated or placed in a plastic sleeve so it an be used again. If you plan to use it again usin a washable crayon or marker would probably be best.

Getting the Alphabet Tracing Mats

First, you will need to download the set.

Star Themed Alphabet Tracing MatsDownload

Second, if you don’t have Acrobat Reader you will need to download it. The set is an Acrobat Reader PDF.

Third, you must go to your download file and open the page.  You won’t have to hunt for it in your download file if you open it right away.

Making the Tracing Mats Reusable

If you plan on using the mats over and over again, you may want to laminate them. Below I have suggested products that you may want to use to cover them.

The links below are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. My Amazon Picks

Scotch Brand PRO Thermal Laminator, Never Jam…$54.68$128.93 (11154)

Scotch Thermal Laminating Pouches, 100 Count-P…$15.98$24.68 (63556)

Scotch Thermal Laminating Pouches, 200- Count-…$27.99$42.99 (23612)

Hammermill Printer Paper, Great White 100% Recy…$17.00 (4917)AllAds by Amazon

Exploring the Alphabet Letter Mats

There are a number for ways to explore the mats. The mats can be placed in a writing center. The mats can be explored in a small group. While the mats don’t have place for your children’s name, they would write their names on them and use them for morning work.

More Letter Activities

Letter Letters with Crayons Printable Task Cards

Building Letters with Crayons

Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Printable Mats

Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs

Butterfly Letter Tracing Activities

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Butterfly letter tracing activities focusing on uppercase and lowercase letters are in this set. There are half sheet mats for each of the alphabet letters. Two versions of each mat are in the set. The first version has a colored border. The second version has a black and white border. It will be up to you to decide which version you want to use.

While the set focuses on alphabet letters, the butterfly displayed also has tracing lines. It will be up to you to decide if you want your children to trace the butterful too. Parts of the butterfly may be hard for younger children to trace. You may want your children to trace just the wings or the body of the butterfly.

Getting the Butterfly Letter Tracing Activities

First, you will need to download the set.

Butterfly Letter Tracing ActivitiesDownload

Second, if you don’t have Acrobat Reader you will need to download it. The algorithm page is an Acrobat Reader PDF file.

Third, you must go to your download file and open the page.  You may be asked if you want the file to open right after you download it. You won’t have to hunt for it in your download file if you are.

Making the Butterfly Letter Tracing Actvities Reusable

If you plan on using the tracing activities over and over again, you may want to laminate them. Below I have suggested products that you may want to use to cover them.

The links below are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. My Amazon Picks

Scotch Brand PRO Thermal Laminator, Never Jam…$54.68$128.93 (11154)

Scotch Thermal Laminating Pouches, 100 Count-P…$15.98$24.68 (63556)

Scotch Thermal Laminating Pouches, 200- Count-…$27.99$42.99 (23612)

Hammermill Printer Paper, Great White 100% Recy…$17.00 (4917)AllAds by Amazon

Exploring the Letter Tracing Activities

Once you have decided on the letter and version of the tracing activity you want to use, you can get started. If you choose to use the pages as worksheets you print out enough for each of your children to use. However, you can use them as tracing mats in a writing center or with a small group. There really isn’t a wrong way to explore them.

More Alphabet Activities

Building Alphabet Letters Kids Learning Activity

Building Alphabet Letters

Click Clack Alphabet Learning Laptop Activity - This activity was created to go along with the book Click, Clack, Moo Cows That Type. It includes a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and alphabet letter cards.

Click Clack Moo Alphabet Letter Laptop

Alphabet Match Game with a Spider Theme

Alphabet Match with a Spider-Theme

Preschool Tracing Activities

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This series focuses on preschool tracing activities. Although the series features the word preschool, any of the activities could be used by older children. Tracing is a great way for children of all ages to work on their fine motor skills. Holding a pencil or any other writing tool can be challenging. Focusing on the lines you are trying to stay on is also challenging.

Writing tools like pencils, crayons and markers designed for each of your children’s abilities are traditional tracing tools. Q-tips or paintbrushes dipped in watercolors and held like a writing tool would also work. A small object like a pumpkin seed held between chopsticks would also work.

Preschool Tracing Activities in This Series

There are 12 different animals featured on the Fine Motor Practice Animal Tracing Pages. This set will give children a lot of time to practice tracing. Young preschoolers may find it challenging to trace all the lines in one sitting. If you choose to use it with them, they could work on one section at a time.

Butterfly Letter Tracing Mats will be printed out on half sheets. Each page of the set displays two letter mats. This set of mats gives children the opportunity to work on uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and the features of a butterfly. Children could just work on the letters on this page if they like.

Star-Themed Alphabet Tracing Cards are available in three different layouts. The set includes uppercase and lowercase letter mats. There is also a layout that features uppercase and lowercase letters together. It will be up to you to decide which layouts to work with. While children can write the letter inside the outline, children could just trace the outline if they like.

Tracing the Lines on Thanksgiving Turkeys would be fun to do during November. Children can trace the lines on the turkey feathers and then color the turkeys.

These turkey line tracing pages invite children to lead a turkey across the lines and to the other side. This is probably the easiest tracing set in the series. It might be fun to trace the lines with a feather rather than a pencil.

More Tracing Activities

Ghost Tracing Pages

Letter and Number Literacy- Fine Motor Webs

Letter and Number Literacy Webs

5 Days of Free Preschool Printables

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5 Days of Free Preschool Printables features fine motor or prewriting activities, numbers, alphabet letters, gross motor skills, and shapes. While fine motor or prewriting activities will be shared with JDaniel4’s Mom this week. 3 Dinosaurs will be sharing the remaining preschool skills.

Each day this week both blogs will share a preschool activity. The activities will be posted below on the day they are shared. Please take the time to come back and check out each day’s activity. It will be fun to see not only the pages you have come to expect from JDaniel4’s Mom but also find out what 3 Dinosaurs will be sharing.

5 Days of Free Preschool Printables

This series starts on November 6th and will end on November 10th. Please take a moment to visit each of the printable shared each day.

Monday

3 Dinosaurs

Alphabet Coloring Easy Reader Book Printable has a letter on each page with a matching picture for kids to color. A fun ABC activity for kids with all 26 letters of the alphabet.

JDaniel4’s Mom

Fine Motor Tracing- Animal Tracing Pages are a great way to improve fine motor skills. Children can use any number of writing tools to trace each of the animals. This set features a lion, snail, lion, owl, elephant, turtle, koala bear, monkey, penguin, narwhal, ladybug, cat, and bear.

Tuesday

Free Prewriting Printable- Funk Prewriting Tracing Stips are 3 Dinosaurs’ share for today. Children will have fun tracing over these funky lines.

Butterfly Letter Tracing Activities invite children to trace both uppercase and lowercase letters. B/W and colored bordered versions of each letter are in the set. These will be fun to explore as worksheets or laminated versions would be great in a writing center.

Wednesday

3 Dinosaurs has created a number recognition mat set that was created to use with playdough. You could use pom-poms or counters if your children don’t like working with objects with textures.

Star-Themed Alphabet Tracing Mats allow children to trace alphabet letters and stars. The mats are half-sheets. That makes them the perfect size to put in a writing center or put out on the kitchen table for your child to work on.

Thursday

3 Dinosaurs have created a simple shape-tracing set. I love that the pages display the shapes flipped and rotated.

The Tracing Lines on Turkey pages give children the chance to work on prewriting or fine motor skills along with coloring a turkey. This set comes from right here on JDaniel4’s Mom.

Friday

Turkey Line Tracing Pages invites children to trace a line that connects one turkey to another.

3 Dinosaurs have a set of gross motor movement dice movement activities that get your children up and moving. Children can put the various activities together to create a fun exercise session.

More Preschool Activities to Explore

Preschool Reading Under the Sea Printable with Letters - Your students at school or children at home can build words and word families on an under the sea work mat.

Preschool Reading and Building Words Activity

Bird Shape I Spy

STEM Building Task Cards that Explore Numbers and Math Concepts

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Many of us learn and come to understand math concepts like numbers, tally marks, and shapes through hands-on learning. Below you are going to find a series of STEM building task cards that you can download for free.

Exploring the Math Concepts

There are several ways your children can explore the math concepts on the cards. First, they can place crayons over the crayons on the cards. Second, they can place their building creation beside the card. Finally, they can place the crayons below the card. The last two options will allow your children’s eyes to scan left to right or up and down.

Wait! Do We Need to Use Crayons?

If you don’t have crayons available, you could use any of the following items to build with:

  • craft sticks
  • Q-tips
  • straws
  • plastic spoons
  • pencils
  • toothpicks (You may want to cut off the sharp tips of the toothpicks before you have your children use them.)

Exploring Math Concepts in Books

Below you will find a children’s book at explores one or many of the math concepts featured on the cards. You may want to read one of the books to your children before they start this activity.

Links below are affiliate links.

Getting the STEM Task Cards

You can click on the link below each of the task card set pictures it will take you to the post that shares more about each of the sets. You will find a hyperlink to the PDF file for each set of task cards on the post.

As I mentioned the sets are in a PDF format. You will need to have a PDF document reader like Adobe Acrobat to open the sets.

Once you have downloaded the set that you want, you can print them out. I would recommend printing them out onto cardstock if you have it available.

 

Building Shapes with Crayons STEM Task CardsBuilding Shapes with Crayons STEM Task Cards

Greater Than Less Than Activity Cards

Greater Than and Less Than STEM Task Cards

Building Numbers with Crayons STEM Task Cards

Learning Numbers 1-10 with Crayons STEM Task Cards

Building Numbers 11-20 with Crayons STEM Task Cards

Learning Numbers 11-20 with Crayons STEM Task Cards

Exploring the Numbers 1-10 with Tally Mark STEM Activity Cards

Exploring the STEM Task Cards

You can have your children build on their own or you can build alongside them. Whether they build what is on each card on their own or with you, you will want to have your children describe to you what they have built and how they built it. Breaking down the process they used step by step will help them use higher-level thinking skills.

There is one more task card set in this series. It focuses on letters of the alphabet.

Letter Letters with Crayons Printable Task Cards

Learning Letters with Crayons STEM Task Cards

 

 

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Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Letter Mats

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Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Printable Mats

Plastic eggs are fun to find during egg hunts or in a basket on Easter morning. They are also great to use when you are learning letters. You can use learning letters printable mats and a set of twelve plastic eggs to work on the letters of the alphabet.

Before your children start their letter work, you can have them find the eggs around your classroom or a room of your house. If you think this would be chaotic, you can have the egg sections sitting in a basket or bucket ready for your children to use.

If you choose to have an egg hunt, you may want to read your children the book We’re Going on an Egg Hunt or Peppa’s Easter Egg Huntto your children. Children who hadn’t had hunt experience will gain background experience on how they work.

Getting Ready for the Learning Letters Activity

Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Printable Mats

You will need to print out the Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Letter Mats. They were designed to be printed out on a color printer. If you choose to print them out on a black and white printer, they chick and egg will be shades of gray.

Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Printable Mats - Building a Letter H

You will also need about six plastic eggs per child. Your children will use the tops and bottom of the eggs to build the letters of the alphabet.  At the end of this post, you will find some cool plastic eggs that can be used for this activity.

Learning Letters with Plastic Egg Activity

Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Printable Mats - Building a Letter

You can give your children one letter mat to work on at a time or you can give them a stack of the mats. If you give them a stack of the mats, they can go through them and pick the letter they want to work on.

Once each child has a letter mat, invite them to place a plastic egg half on each of the circles on their mat.  When they have all their egg sections in place, have them tell you what letter they built. Then they can work on another letter mat.

If you like this learning letters activity, here are some more you will love:

Click Clack Alphabet Letter Learning Laptop Activity

Alphabet Cup Hunt

Alphabet Letter Match with a Spider Theme

Letter Pizza

Cookie-Themed Alphabet Activity

Clapping and Stomping Alphabet Activities

 


Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Printable Mats- Your children at home and students at school will have fun building the letters of the alphabet with the tops and bottoms of plastic Ester eggs.

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Awesome Language Arts Worksheets

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Awesome Language Arts Worksheets and Learning Printables

 

Over the last few years I have created a number for language arts worksheets  and printables  for my son to work on.  They have been gathered together in the post so that you can used them with your children.  I hope you have as much fun with them as we have.

Language Arts Worksheets

Awesome Language Arts Worksheets and Learning Printables

Build The Alphabet with LEGO Light Sabers

These LEGO themed light sabers can be used to build the letters of the alphabet. The free printable has light sabers for various sizes that can be used for letter building.

Awesome Language Arts Worksheets and Learning Printables

Sight Word Scarecrow Game

A printable scarecrow themed game board can be used to work on sight words or really any skills that your children to need focus on.

How-to-Use-LEGO-and-Reading-Worksheets-To-Explore-Colors

Fill in the Color Word Sentences for LEGO

I composed to language art worksheets that have blanks where color words should be. Your children can use various colored LEGO to fill in the blanks. These are  a little like Mad Libs!

Awesome Language Arts Worksheets and Learning Printables

This Mouse Needs a House Reading Comprehension Sheets

I was given the opportunity to review the wonderful children’s book This Mouse Needs a House. I created to language arts worksheets that give children the opportunity work on reading comprehension skills. Children can read the book on their own with as a class and then share what they remember from the book.

Awesome Language Arts Worksheets and Learning Printables

Spelling Trace and Write

This spelling practice printable was placed in a picture frame. My son was able to write each spelling word I called out to him on the frame’s glass. When we were done, it was super easy to clean off the glass.

Awesome Language Arts Worksheets and Learning Printables

Summer Writing Journal Prompts

Some children have trouble knowing what to write in their journals. They need something to inspire them. I made this list of summer writing prompts for my son. He is just the kind of child the needs a little inspiration before writing.

Awesome Language Arts Worksheets and Learning Printables

Printable Sight Word Spiders for Floor Webs

This set of printable spiders has a blank area for you or your children to write in sight words they need to work on. We explored the sight word spiders on a tape web in our garage.

Awesome Language Arts Worksheets and Learning Printables

 

Chicken Themed Letter Recognition

This is one of those language arts worksheets that you complete by rolling dice.  I made lowercase letter dice for my son to roll.  My son had to color in the uppercase letter that matched the letter he rolled.

The link below is an affiliate link.

All you need to make your own wooden letter dice are small wood cubes and colored dot stickers.

Awesome Language Arts Worksheets and Learning Printables

Writing Sight Words on a Rainbow Printable

The goal of this worksheet is to write each of the sight words on the cloud on a one of the band of the rainbow. They can write each word as many times as they can on its band of the rainbow.

We had fun exploring, reviewing and learning using each of these language arts worksheets. I hope you will too. Please let me know which ones you decide to try with your children in a comment below or on my Facebook page.

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A Isn’t B! I C!- Letter Knowledge

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Outdoor Fun- Alphabet Watering
This is the last post in the literacy series I have been posting on Tuesdays. It will look at letter knowledge and helping your child see that each letter has a name and specific sound.

Birth to 2-Years Old

  • Help your baby or toddler see and feel different shapes as you play. Say, “The ball is round.”
  • Point out letters on toys, food boxes, books, and other objects around the house.

2 to 3-years old

  • Practice making letters from clay, finger paint, shaving cream, pudding, etc…
  • Write your child’s name in the creative ways, like in the air, in dirt or sand, or traced on their backs.
  • Keep magnetic letters on your refrigerator or foam letters in the tub.

4 to 5-years

  • Start every letter in a sentence with the sound of a particular letter.
  • Cut out pictures from magazines or catalogs that start with the letter you are learning.
  • Help your child write words that interest her using crayons, markers, or pencil on paper

How we work on letter knowledge at our house:

  • We look for letters all over.
  • I asked JDaniel to look for letters by using the letter sound. “Where is the letter that says ay?”
  • We have foam bathtub letters that can be used on the fridge when wet or in the tub.
  • Wooden letter puzzles are part of our puzzle collection.
  • We read lots of alphabet books
  • JDaniel has a laptop that works on letter recognition. (I got it at a consignment store for $6.)
  • I write letters all over the driveway and ask JDaniel to dump water from his watering can on the correct letter.

Places to find activities:

 

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