Summer Themed Mark Making Recipe Cards – Pre-Writing Resource

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

Each card shows the marks they’ll need to use at the top, then the finished result below: sun, sunglasses, watermelon, beach ball, boat, ice cream, lollipop and sea.

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 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.
• Combining pre-writing strokes – Many marks on these cards appears inside letters and numbers. 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.
• Spatial reasoning and orientation – Recognizing that the same arch can sit upright as a rainbow or upside down as a boat hull.

Many of  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 Recipes

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

Not a member yet – what are you waiting for? Become a member today and get INSTANT access to all the awesome activities!

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

Get Even More Out of These Summer 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 Whole Summer Scene

Give each child a big sheet of paper and let them use several cards at once to build one sunny summer landscape! 

Invent Your Own Recipe Card

Fold a piece of paper to make a blank card. Children choose two or three marks, work out what those marks could make, draw it underneath and give it a name. If they enjoy the design-your-own angle, our design your own popsicle worksheet is a nice companion for the same kind of open-ended thinking.

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 instead of drawing it. 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. Our 3D paper ice cream craft could be a nice follow up activity.

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.

Mark Making for National Ice Cream Day

National Ice Cream Day falls on the third Sunday in July, which makes the ice cream recipe card the obvious one to pull out that week. Let children fill a whole page with ice creams in as many colors as they can, then they could count up the scoops. You can find plenty more dates worth marking on our Special Day Calendar.

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

Enjoy and let’s nurture those neurons!