Instead of having your child write letters on something, let her write them in something instead. Use sand in a sandbox, a pan full or sugar or cinnamon or a table spread with shaving cream. Help your children to trace letters, easily wiping it out when done each time. This offers a tactile experience as well as visual.
Give your child a sheet of paper with the outline of a large “bubble” letter on it, and let him fill it in by gluing pasta, cotton balls or any other small objects to the paper. Try using an object that matches the letter—macaroni for M, beans for B, sand for S, for example. Create an alphabet on your wall using the letters, placing it low so that he can trace it over with his fingers.
Buy letter-shaped cookie cutters and make sugar cookies, cutting out the cookies with the cutters. After they’re baked, practice spelling simple words together before eating. Alternately, work together to shape the dough into letters without the aid of cutters. Don’t let your child eat a cookie until she can tell you what letter it is and name something that starts with that letter.
Other fun ways to write letters are on the driveway with sidewalk chalk, on a dry erase board or with paint. Starting off, write the letter or a dot outline for your child and let him trace yours before he attempts to write his own. Use bright colors and a variety of mediums to keep it from becoming boring.
If you’re tired of writing dot outlines yourself, create and print custom tracer pages at websites like Kidzone. This is an effective way to help children practice tracing their names, as well as upper and lower case letters and numbers. Choose between a variety of themes that add small pictures to color or, to save ink, no theme at all.