Handwriting

10 Apples Up on Top Pre-Writing Activity

Colleen Beck OTR/L

Colleen Beck, OTR/L is a pediatric occupational therapist and the owner and author of The OT Toolbox website. She manages all of The OT Toolbox social media accounts and runs the popular newsletter. Colleen created The OT Toolbox in 2011 and since then has written thousands of blog posts designed to support therapy providers, educators, parents, counselors, admin, and caregivers in promoting the healthy development of kids. Check out Colleen's blog posts below:

by Colleen Beck OTR/L
September 12, 2016

Ten Apples Up on Top is one of our favorite books. We do love finding fun books to come up with creative book-related activities. In fact, we’ve covered this book before. Today though, I joining other bloggers in the first post in the Virtual Book Club for Kids series for this school year.

The book, Ten Apples Up on Top by Dr. Seuss is a great activity to us in a book club for kids and an awesome book for creative play and hands on learning. We went with an apple theme pre-writing activity based on the book and had so much fun working on pre-writing lines with Ten Apples Up on Top in mind!

Ten Apples Up on Top pre-writing activity

Ten Apples Up on Top book and pre-writing activity

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This activity is very easy to set up. you’ll need only a few materials:

Red pony beads (We received ours from www.craftprojectideas.com)

Markers

Pencil

Paper

To get started on this pre-writing activity, create small circles with a red marker on the paper. This can be a job for the adult/parent/teacher/clinician. The curcles should be about the size of the pony beads and you will want to make them going in two rows, one at the top of the page and one at the bottom of the page.

You or your child can use the brown and green markers to add leaves and stems to each apple.

Show your child how to place a red pony bead on each circle. Grasping the pony beads and placing them on the circles is an exercise in pincer grasp, opening of the thumb web space, and in hand manipulation. Each of these skills is needed for proper pencil grasp and it makes this fine motor activity a great handwriting warm-up exercise.

Then, you can show your child how to draw a line from the top apple to the bottom apple on the paper. They can continue to draw vertical lines connecting each pair of apples. They should draw the lines going from top to bottom to best prepare for correct letter formation.

After completing a page of top-to-bottom vertical lines, kids can repeat the exercise by drawing horizontal lines across a page to connect apples.

Continue to add complexity to pre-writing skills by having them connect lines in a cross sign, an “x” and even in circles and curved lines. We had to make a stack of ten “apples” and trace the line of apples, too!

How many ways can you think of using these apple markers to work on handwriting and pre-writing? Maybe creating letters and connecting the apples would be fun.

Or, try using just one apple as a starting point for forming letters once the child is ready.