Summer Themed Mark Making Prompt Cards – Pre-Writing Resource

These summer mark making prompt cards show the same ten strokes as our summer mark making mat but each is given its own card, which means you can shuffle them up and deal them out, hide them, hold one up for every one to use or choose which one you want to use.

You could stand them in your writing center, add them to a display, use them in a morning tub or spread all ten across your writing table and let your little learners choose.

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 summer themed mark making cards is 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.

These are all 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 Summer Mark Making Prompts

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 Summer Mark Making Cards

Here are some ways you could use them:

Mark Making Memory Game

Print two sets, lay all twenty face down and play a straightforward matching game. Every time a child turns over a card they name the mark out loud, which sneaks in the vocabulary without anyone noticing. When they find a pair, they get to draw that mark on a small whiteboard or piece of paper before their next turn.

Send Them on a Mark Hunt

Hide the ten cards around the room or the yard. Give each child a clipboard and a pencil, and every time they find a card they draw that mark on their sheet before leaving the card where it is for the next person. Good for a bit of gross and fine motor skills!

Peek and Draw

Hold up a card for three seconds, then hide it and ask everyone to draw what they saw. Build up to showing two cards at once for anyone who finds it easy.

Sensory Writing Center

Fill a tray with sand, rice, shaving foam etc and place a card above. The children can use their fingers or a paintbrush to draw the mark on the card. If you have multiple trays you can set up more and they can move on the next one when they’re done. A lovely little activity for your writing table or choosing time.

Build the Marks Instead of Drawing Them

Keeping with the sensory (and fun) theme, prop one card in front of a tray of playdough, pipe cleaners or small manipulatives and let children construct the mark rather than draw it. Rolling a playdough snake into a spiral takes far more hand strength than drawing ti would. It sits nicely in a summer fine motor station alongside something like our sunflower lacing cards.

Line Up a Sequence

Lay three or four cards in a row, left to right, and challenge children to copy the whole sequence onto a strip of paper in the same order. Start with three and build up. This one is doing double duty, because alongside the stroke practice it rehearses working steadily from left to right across a page.

Move From Marks to Names

Once the strokes are comfortable, the a nice next step could be your child’s own name. Our name tracing worksheet generator will build a personalized sheet in seconds, and you can paste in a whole class list at once. 

However you use these summer mark making cards, I hope they help!

Enjoy and let’s nurture those neurons!