Halloween Themed Mark Making Recipe Cards – Pre-Writing Resource

These eight printable Halloween mark making recipe cards are a chance for your little ones to combine simple pre-writing strokes into some spooky pictures.

Each card shows the marks they’ll need to use at the top, then the finished result below. A ghost is an arch, some dots and a wavy line along the bottom. A cauldron, a broom, a spider, a gravestone, a pumpkin, a lollipop and a bat make up the rest.

This could be a nice semi-directed drawing activity for preschool and kindergarten writing centers.

What Exactly Is Mark Making?

Mark making is an umbrella term for every scribble, dot, line and loop a child makes before they start forming actual letters.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children points out that children as young as two begin imitating writing through drawings and symbolic markings, and that these early skills are strong predictors of later reading and writing ability.

What Skills Can Your Little Ones Learn And Develop?

These Halloween themed mark making cards are designed to help your children practice and develop their prewriting skills, such as:

• Pre-writing control – Many of the marks on the cards appear inside letters and numbers. Practicing them means the movement is already familiar by the time formal letter formation begins.
• Fine motor skills and pencil control – Making a loop or a steady ladder takes hand and finger strength.
• Hand-eye coordination – Children have to look at a model and get their hand to reproduce it.
• Visual discrimination – Telling a wave apart from a zig zag, or a swirl from a loop, builds the same noticing skills that later help distinguish b from d.
• Positional and descriptive language – Words like over, under, across, around and through get used while children work.
• Confidence and independence – as they make the marks themselves without any adult help.
• Combining pre-writing strokes – Joining two or three of them together is good letter formation practice for later.
• Part-whole thinking – Children who can break a picture into its components tend to find copying letters easier.

Many of  these are vital fine motor skills that will enable them to become great writers in the future!

RELATED Playdough can also be a great way to improve hand strength – you can check out an easy no cook recipe here!

How To Prepare The Halloween Mark Making Recipes

First you’re going to want to download mark making card set by clicking on download button at the bottom of the page.

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Then print it off and put it somewhere your little ones can see.

Get Even More Out of These Halloween Mark Making Recipe Cards

Here are some ways you could use them:

Play Guess the Recipe

Cover the bottom half of a card so only the marks are showing and see if anyone can work out what they could make. Once they’re familiar with the marks, you could also flip it: show only the picture and see if children can name the marks that went into it.

Build a Spooky Scene From the Finished Pictures

Give everyone a big sheet of paper and let them fill it using only things from the cards. Gravestones along the bottom, bats fluttering in the night sky, a cauldron bubbling away in the corner. It works beautifully as a whole class mural, and might look great pinned up next to some DIY monster bunting for a display that your children made themselves.

Write Your Own Recipe

Once children have the idea, hand them a blank sheet and let them invent something. A witch’s hat, a candy corn, a bone etc. They could draw the finished picture at the bottom first, then decide which marks they used before writing the recipe at the top.

Build the Recipes

Instead of drawing them, stand a card in front of a tray of playdough, pipe cleaners or loose parts and let children construct the picture. Rolling a playdough snake into a spiral takes considerably more hand strength than a marker does, so this is a useful route in for anyone still building up to pencil work.

Card Stories

Pull three cards at random and ask for a story that includes all three. They could try and draw the items in their story then tell you all about it. It turns a simple drawing activity into a creative speaking one as well.

Listen for the First Sound

Bat, pumpkin, ghost, spider, cauldron, gravestone, lollipop. That’s a nice spread of initial sounds right there on the cards. Great for a quick bit of phonics practice…

Bring Them Out for Bat Week

Bat Week runs from October 24 to 31 every year, and it’s a genuine conservation event rather than just a spooky one. The bat card is a nice way in. Draw a few bats together, then talk about the real thing and why people are working to protect them. There are plenty more dates worth building a lesson around on our Special Day Calendar.

However you use these Halloween mark making recipe cards, I hope your little ones have some spooky fun!

Enjoy and let’s nurture those neurons!