Now we're going to talk about a letter writing worksheet which is one of the other earlier things that you can start when children are learning to first read their letter sounds. Now a word about worksheets, you don't have to make them, if you want to do everything from scratch with a notebook and have your child keep a notebook and you're constantly working with them, then you can just do it that way but if you want to ever be able to leave your child for five minutes to get coffee or do something and say fill out this worksheet and I'll come back and check it. Sometimes it's good to have some worksheets on hand and you can make them yourself. I don't like the worksheets they make today because they add all these cartoons and colors and they give the children about ten percent of the page to actually do some work. Children don't need to be entertained, the entertainment they find is the confidence that they can do the skill. So I like to pack my worksheets with as many little things as possible for them to do. Here's an example, where I just draw simple squares around the page and then I put a line under each square. I write a very very simple cartoon picture of something that has a distinct letter sound that it starts with and you can come up with as many as you like. Make sure you cover as many letters of the alphabet as you possibly can and fill up all the pictures and give it to your child, now, don't give your child an original worksheet. After you make that worksheet, photocopy it, photocopy it ten times, twenty times, fifty times, however many times you think it will come up, especially if you have younger children that you think will benefit or plan on having more children, you're going to use this worksheet over and over and over again and you're going to find that it's great so, photocopy that and then start and say, here you go, what is this? That's a banana, so they put a b right down there. What is that, that's a dog, they put a d. Bs and Ds will get mixed up a lot in the beginning. That is a man, put an m, that is a hat and so on until we fill them all up. Remember, don't kill yourself trying to make the picture really cool, as long as it's recognizable, that's all that matters.
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