Pinkalicious Sand Tray for Pre-Writing Practice

My daughter has one colour that is her uttermost favourite in the world – Pink and discovering Pinkalicious by Victoria and Elizabeth Kann for this month’s Virtual Book Club for Kids has made her day. She absolutely loves it and when we discussed what she wanted to work on she said she wanted to practice her handwriting but make it PINK!

Now I had some fun ideas of creating some coloured sand for a sand tray but when I checked we’ve run out of food colouring thanks to last month’s Rainbow Fish Sugar Cookies so instead we looked at how we could create a Pinkalicious sand tray without colouring the sand pink.

Materials needed for a Pinkalicious Sand Tray for Pre-Writing Practice

Sand (or table salt if you have no sand)

Pink and Silver Glitter

Pink Plate

Bamboo Stick

Paper

Pink Highlighter or Marker

Set up for a Pinkalicious Sand Tray for Pre-Writing Practice

Using a paper plate fill with the sand and add in the glitter mix together.

On the paper cut into sections and on each section create different letter shapes that children will need for writing – o, l, u, n, v and join them together so that they can see how to connect the shapes together.

Using the Pinkalicious Sand Tray for Pre-Writing Practice with Preschoolers

Sit down together and look at the letter forms you have produced.

Using your finger trace of the marks and then guide your child’s finger over the marks as well.

Demonstrate no the paper plate sand tray the letter form.

Guide your child’s hand to produce the letter form and then let them practice on their own.

Move between the different letter forms as you work with your child.

Extending the Pinkalicious Sand Tray for Older children

This is easy to extend – you can use the same sand tray with children working on letter forms – as you work on a letter or phoneme with them use the paper plate sand tray to work on the individual letters.

It’s also a great idea to work on cursive start with the letter forms of cursive script – you can download our printable cursive alphabet and use that to see how the letters are written. Then copy them into the sand tray.

Moving on from the cursive – why not join up the diagraphs as your child learns them e.g. ch, ll, oo, oi, ow etc..

Use the sand tray for spelling practice with older children – see here how to do Salt Tray Spelling Practice from Creative Family Fun.

More Pinkalicious Activities for Kids

Check out this selection of Pinkalicious Activities for Kids from the co-hosts of the monthly Virtual Book Club for Kids.

---

Pin this Pinkalicious Sand Tray to find again

Share with others on Facebook