Winter Letter Tracing Activity

Inside: a free printable winter letter tracing activity for preschoolers, with three ways to play.

If you’ve been teaching your kids about polar bears, they’ll quickly recognize how silly these scarf-wrapped ice skating polar bears are.

In fact, these friendly polar bears inspired me to make this winter letter tracing activity to share with you today.

Children can pretend to glide with the ice skating bears as they work on line tracing and practice letter formation.

When Should Children Start Tracing Letters?

As you may know, children tend to be ready to start learning some basic handwriting around age 4 or 5.

Of course, before they can work on letter tracing, students need to have some familiarity with the concept of letters. Starting with the letters in their name is a favorite way to begin.

Next, they’ll need some instruction in letter formation. You don’t want them practicing wrong because that’s hard to un-learn later.

Before children are ready to use a pencil you can introduce some easier letter activities like writing trays and my digital letter tracing activity.

Drawing and writing on vertical surfaces is also helpful.

Once children are consistently forming letters correctly, they’ll still need lots of practice writing letters. That’s where fun games and activities like these winter letter tracing cards come in!

Winter Letter Tracing Activity

You can use this activity in a literacy center, with small groups, or one-on-one.

Materials & Prep

I suggest you laminate the cards and/or print them on cardstock. For the full page, if you don’t laminate it you’ll want to slip it into a page protector.

Here’s all you’ll need for this activity:

• Printable (see below), with letter cards cut apart
• Dry erase markers

3 Ways to Play

This activity is pretty flexible. You can use it in the way that meets your children where they are. Here are three ideas for you:

1. Concentration

Select a group of matching uppercase and lowercase cards, and then mix them up. Lay them out face down. Then, the child turns over two cards at a time trying to find matching letters.

When the child finds a matched set, he or she traces the letters with a dry erase pen and sets those cards to the side.

If the cards don’t match, put them back face down. Repeat until all the cards matched up.

2. Path Tracing Only

First, you or the child picks out a pair of matching cards, and lays them down on the activity sheet.

Then, the child uses a dry erase marker to trace the ice skating path from the top of the sheet to the bottom.

3. Concentration + Path Tracing

In this version, you can combine the above two activities. As the kids turn over matching pairs of uppercase and lowercase letters, they lay those cards on the activity sheet and trace the whole path as well as the letters.

Erasing between letters and switching up the colors is part of the fun!

More Winter Alphabet Activities

When you’re ready for more winter alphabet activities, you also might like the hands-on snap cube winter alphabet mats in my store.

Happy Teaching,

Heather