The Crafty Classroom (review)
Disclosure: I received this product free through the Homeschool Review Crew.
Kindergarten is such a fun age! Kids are excited to learn, and the learning they do is so laid back that it’s just a great time to be a parent. To enhance Dragonfly’s kindergarten experience, we have had the pleasure of reviewing the Tracing Bundle from The Crafty Classroom. Dragonfly loves to trace stuff, so this was a great fit for him. The Tracing Bundle comes with two files: Editable Name Tracing Pack and Tracing Bundle C. I want to talk about the latter first.
Tracing Bundle
This file is a 297-page printable PDF with loads and loads of things for your child to trace. Dragonfly and I looked over it together and he picked a few pages he wanted to trace. I also chose a couple that I wanted him to work on to help him in his early penmanship. Then I printed them all out and stuck them in a folder to distribute to him slowly. Each day we worked on these (about 3x a week), I gave him one of “his” pages and one of “my” pages. His were mostly shapes and pictures; mine were mostly words and numbers.
The Tracing Bundle includes things like the uppercase and lowercase alphabet, numbers, colors, shapes, days of the week, months of the year, seasons, and sight words. Then there are images – dogs with bones, seashells and waves, and more. As you move through the pack, the emphasis changes to drawing the shapes in the right order – for your square, starting in the upper left corner, going straight down, then to the right, then up, and back to the left. This guidance is helpful for “pre-writing,” encouraging children to do things in the right order. That way, when they’re ready to write letters, they understand the concept of doing things in the right order.
Editable Name Tracing Pack
This one was really cool! The very first page of this PDF is the instructions on how to edit it properly. (The main thing is that it has to be opened in Adobe Acrobat, not a web browser or other program.) Then you scroll through until you get to this page:
As you can see, there are three choices here. Each one is attached to a theme. Pick the one you want, and type in your child’s name(s), and the PDF will pop those names into the appropriate pages for printing
This gives you the same types of tracing pages, but all entirely personalized. This is fantastic for kids from around 3-4 and up who are learning to write their names. I wish I’d had this for my older kids! You can bet I’ll be using it next year with Bumblebee, though, as well as working with Dragonfly sooner with it. What a fantastic resource for helping kids to write their name!
Final Thoughts
I am super glad we got to review the Tracing Bundle. It has been really great to have something simple for Dragonfly to work on while I’m doing more intense work with the bigger kids. He adores writing and drawing, as I mentioned before, so he’s been happy as a clam with these pages, and I’m happy to print out as many of them as he can work through.
The Crafty Classroom has offered a variety of different products to the Homeschool Review Crew members, so make sure to check out more reviews by clicking through.
Blessings,
