An Attempt at Writing Letters - T

The twins (32 months) meet almost all of the Kindergarten readiness skills, except being able to write their names, so last week I started teaching L and E to write letters.  The plan was to work on writing at least one letter a week, starting with the ones that are easier (straight lines), and then going through until they can write the entire alphabet.  We started with letter 'T'.  First I asked them to form the letter (both uppercase and lowercase) from craft sticks, then we went on to some worksheets:

As you can see from the photos, this was not too successful.  Both girls did a great job circling the turtles that had the letter T next to them.  However, when it came to tracing and writing the letter in the lines, they just were not ready.  I've seen L write a couple letters before using a drawing program on my Kindle (she can do letters L, T, H, I, and O), but I think the restriction of having to write something within the lines confused her. 

So I think we're first going to work on getting a correct writing grip (I'll have to search the web for some ideas on how to reinforce this).  Then we'll do more pre-writing tracing activities, followed by more simplified worksheets that allow them to trace larger letters before I expect them to write within the lines.

The girls asked for paints, so I let them paint their craft stick letter Ts:

They turned out really beautiful.  I'll see try to pull out pre-writing tracing sheets this week and see how the girls do with those.