First Lines: Stage One
Hand a three-year-old a letter-tracing book before they can control a line, and they decide they are bad at writing before they have really begun.
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What’s inside
- Three strokes in the order children usually learn them: the down stroke, the across stroke, and the circle. The paths start wide and get narrower.
- Support that fades as you go: first a road with edges to stay inside, then a gray line on its own to follow, and at the very end only a dot to start from.
- Forty activities, every one of them different, with no filler and no repeats, printed on one side only so you can tear a page out and lose nothing from the back.
- A ready check at the front so you start in the right place instead of guessing, and a grown-up note at the foot of every page: what it builds, and what to do if it turns out to be hard.
- Deliberately heavy lines, made for little hands and chunky crayons, plus guidance for left-handed children and an honest note on pencil grip.
Who this is for
Most preschool writing books open with letter tracing, and for a great many three-year-olds that is too soon. Forming letters comes after a child can already make a controlled line and a controlled circle, and asking for letters first is the most common reason a child decides they are bad at writing before they have really begun. This book does the step before: the down stroke, the across stroke, and the circle, with the support fading page by page until only a dot to start from is left.
The next book in the series covers the cross, the square, and the first diagonals.
Published through Amazon under our imprint, Second Bloom Press.