Free Tracing Worksheets for Handwriting Practice

Published:
July 4, 2022

Sarah Shelton

Contributor:
Sarah Shelton

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If you are looking for some fun and helpful activities to keep your little ones busy at home try some tracing worksheets. These worksheets are great for building hand strength and teaching pencil grip to prepare for proper letter formation and handwriting.

Free Tracing Worksheets for Handwriting Practice with image of child writing on a worksheet.

Tracing Worksheets

If you have preschool and kindergarten aged children, you may be wondering how to teach them handwriting. Tracing worksheets are a great way to help your child develop prewriting skills and build fine motor control at the same time.

How do I teach my child to trace letters?

There are many ways that you can teach your child how to trace letters. Tracing letters is great to help your child to practice writing for the first time. 

These handwriting exercises are great for teaching tracing:

  • Trace a letter on your child’s hand. Lay their hand out and trace the letter with your finger while saying it out loud. This will engage all of their senses as they take in what the letter looks like, feels like and sounds like. 
  • Practice drawing and writing in sand or rice. These large movements will help to strengthen their arms and fingers movements.
  • Let your child scribble and draw on large pieces of paper or on a chalkboard or white board. Have them practice writing curvy lines and squiggles. 

What age should kids be to start tracing letters?

You can introduce your child to tracing letters as soon as they are ready for it as a toddler, usually around 3-4 years old. Kids first start writing their letters at the ages of 4 or 5 years old. Before they begin writing their letters you will want to introduce them to tracing letters. 

Learning how to trace letters helps your little ones to develop the small motor muscles that will develop the fine motor skills that they need to begin writing on their own.

Is tracing a good way to practice drawing?

Tracing a picture helps your child to focus on the physical aspect of drawing without having to overthink what they are doing. Some children clam up and get upset when you ask them to draw something because they don’t know how.

When they can practice tracing a picture they begin to see what they need to do in their mind without getting overwhelmed. It is a great way to help them to be comfortable with seeing what a drawing should look like as they are tracing it.

Is tracing cheating?

Tracing is not cheating. It’s a way to help your child build prewriting skills and aids in hand-eye coordination. It can be used as a helpful tool for writing, tracing letters, numbers and also in learning how to draw. Tracing can help your child to be able to learn to write and draw on their own without any help in the future. 

Letter Tracing Worksheets

These letter tracing worksheets are pretty special because they show you the letter, a picture of an item that starts with that letter, and what the letter looks like in sign language. 

This collection of free printable tracing worksheets will help your children to trace and write letters, and even write short words that match the accompanying picture.

Help your kids build fine motor control and practice letter recognition while they trace and write letters with these alphabet templates for tracing. You may also like these uppercase and lowercase alphabet tracing pages.

Number Tracing Worksheets

Is your child ready to start writing numbers 0-20? Give them some number writing practice help with number preschool worksheets. They will learn to recognize the numbers as they are reading them to trace and write them out.

Tracing numbers images for the numbers 5,6,7,8,9 and then text overlay.

Name Tracing Worksheets

Teach your child how to write their own name and the names of friends and family with this name tracing generator. You can also have them practice their spelling words or sight words by simply typing in the word you want them to have extra practice writing. 

name tracing worksheet

Tracing Lines Worksheets

Tracing lines will help to prepare your child for writing. These tracing lines kindergarten download pdf worksheets will help your child to practice tracing horizontal lines, vertical lines, diagonal lines, wavy line, jagged lines, curves, zig-zags and tracing shapes.

Does your child need help with drawing and writing in a straight or curved line? These tracing lines worksheets will give them plenty of practice with tracing lines in various shapes and sizes. 

When your children trace the lines from left to right to complete the tracing line worksheet activities, this will help them with their pre-writing skills. 

Shape Tracing Worksheets

Shapes are such an important part of our world and an integral part of early learning skills. These shape tracing worksheets will teach your children about shape recognition, shape symmetry and patterns as they are tracing the shapes and working through the different activities. 

shape tracing

Preschool Tracing Worksheets

Preschoolers that want to do school at home like their older siblings will enjoy some fun picture tracing worksheets. Preschool tracing worksheets are some of the best ways to keep your young learners engaged and excited to learn. You can laminate them and use dry erase markers so that they can be used over and over again. 

Are you learning about astronomy or outer space in your science lessons? These space tracing worksheets are a fun theme to go along with what you are learning and help them to with line tracing practice. 

These free animal picture tracing worksheets are so much fun. Your kids will enjoy tracing the picture then coloring  animals. It will be like they created their very own cute coloring page.

Letter Formation Tracing Worksheets

Tracing letters is important for key letter formation skills. When your child uses isolated strokes in letter formation tracing worksheets they will develop the skills they need to write on their own. 

Practice letter formation with beginning sounds with these adorable alphabet letter formation cards. Print the cards out and have your children work on one letter at a time tracing and coloring the pictures to go along with the beginning sounds. 

Handwriting practice helps your brain to understand and visualize letter recognition. These dot start handwriting practice printables will strengthen your children’s letter formation and recognition skills. 

Cursive Tracing Worksheets

There are so many benefits of cursive writing. Kids can practice forming their upper case and lower case cursive letters with cursive alphabet tracing practice worksheets. There are multiple options to practice writing the letters over and over, with fun coloring pages to keep your children engaged. 

cursive alphabet tracing pages

Alphabet Tracing Worksheets

Are your preschoolers working on learning the letters of the alphabet in your homeschool? 

These no prep alphabet tracing worksheets give your children lots of practice in upper case and lower case letters with every letter in the printable alphabet.

These ABC tracing worksheets will help your children practice their uppercase letter formation. Each page has pictures that start with the letter and the capital letter to trace 9 times over.

Trace the letter A-Z with these printable pdf worksheets. There are 3 free worksheets to choose from in lower case letters, upper case letters and all the letters in the alphabet.

In Conclusion:

Tracing pages are such a wonderful activity for your little ones. Tracing is a fun way for young children to get extra practice on their writing skills and strengthen their fine motor skills at the same time. 

You can use handwriting worksheets for kindergarten free printable to help your kids get some easy practice.

child writing on lined handwriting paper with text overlay

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