When Little T was enrolled in a public special needs preschool, his teacher sent reports home to every parent with the activities the child did that day. Typically, this would be time consuming and expensive to print out this report daily. However, the teacher used a very brilliant method to make it less consuming and expensive by using ONLY 1 sheet of paper per child. You might think “How did she reuse the same paper over and over without ruining it?”
She used page protectors and dry erase markers to create an erasable and reusable way to communicate with parents. I thought the idea was brilliant and could be applied to so many other worksheet type things that young children will need. I searched for two things to get me started, a tracing font and a writing line font. I use a dotted tracing font but you can find more font types at 1001 Free Fonts.
I used the trace font to print a 4 line document; line 1 = first name in trace font, line 2 = blank penmanship line, line 3= last name in trace font, and line 4 = blank penmanship line. On the back of the document, I printed an alphanumeric page which has letters (upper and lower) and numbers 0-9. I printed 1 copy, front and back, for each kid (including my nephew) and put them in a page protector. I showed the boys how to use the page and they had a blast practicing to write their name and all the letters and numbers.
They kept asking me for more ‘stuff’ to write because they loved the write and erase idea so I printed out some other tracing pages I found on Childcareland and put all the pages into a thin 3 ring binder (you could use binder rings if you don’t have a binder). The boys love to take it everywhere with them. I added a pencil pouch in the front which holds a variety of colored dry erase markers and a piece of cloth to erase the marker. This keeps them occupied whether they are at home, at grandma’s or on the road.
And the best part of it, I can add, remove, or change the pages as they get older. I have saved a ton of paper already.
2 replies on “Reusable Tracing Sheets”
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[…] their letters and numbers. This can be printed and traced once or printed to be reused as described here. It’s available here. If you haven’t installed the fonts we use, you may need to […]