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Engaged Printing Guide: Home

For Pre K - Grade 2 teachers to understand sequencing for letter printing development and practice for students.

Design of this Guide

Learning to print letters is a daunting task for many students.

Proper sequencing of instruction and worksheets is important for students to concentrate on the things that matter.

Assessment on printing should be kept separate from any other task (i.e. when you want to assess printing, content shouldn't be assessed and vice-versa).

It is important that printing early on is not independent as more can be gained from watching the students perform the task than from the end product.

Correcting motions, grip and order of strokes has to be done in situ. 

It is also crucial not to overwhelm students with large amounts of practice.

Five minutes of instruction and 10 minutes of practice is plenty.

Things to Remember When Practicing Print

Things to remember when practicing printing:

  • Ensure letter recognition prior to starting printing; otherwise, the student will only learn to draw the symbols rather than understanding the symbols as letters
  • Size Issues: Experiment in using adaptive paper to help students understand their letter formation on the lines (i.e. knowing which is the top, middle and bottom)
  • Grip: Use a short pencil or crayon to promote a tripod grasp, but not too thick as this can open up the grasp too big
  • Selecting printing tool: Markers and paints can create strokes easily on paper, versus crayons and pencils need more force to make a mark
  • Ensure you provide 10 minutes of demonstration (i.e. coach beside the student), 5 minutes of the student practicing with supervision to ensure sequence of strokes (i.e. starting and ending points on the line)
  • Coaching and demonstrating correct letter sequencing and formation is key to legibility

District Teacher-Librarian

Recommended Activites and Order

We recommend starting students off with path tracing. 

This activity from Ready to Print is an example of a good quality path tracing activity that varies the types of path. When doing this with students pay particular attention to how students start and stop at corners versus smooth curves.

While this kind of activity can be laminated for use with a whiteboard marker, this doesn't give the same tactile response as a pencil or chalk for emergent printers.

This is the next style of activity, one involving path tracing of shapes. 

The above activity sheet from Ready to Print is another good example of how to do this activity.

You need to have a variety of shapes including ones that return to the starting point, as well as ones involving intersections.

As with the last activity, pay attention to students starting and stopping at corners and how they deal with intersections.

This next set of activities removes the lines and asks students to trace accurately without the use of guidelines. 

Again, Ready to Print has a good example of how this style of activity looks.

The main goal here is for students to continue the progression of movement, but now with tighter spacing and no guidelines.

Now we move on to actual letters and numbers. 

The activity from Ready to Print provides versions that are large or small. Start with a large set of letters and progress towards smaller. It is important that students practice on going to smaller ones as the goal is to get them printing at standard size rather than printing overly large.

Each of the examples contained in the above file shows different printing sizes and styles.

The progression is:

  1. Open boxes, large
  2. Open boxes, small
  3. Large guidelines
  4. Small guidelines
  5. No guidelines, large
  6. No guidelines, small

The two examples on each page show that the students do not have to stick to just a single line/box to fit everything in.

Guide Credits

Jody Edamura, OT        Brigette da Silva, SLP        Les Smith, OT        Joseph Jeffery, District TL