Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Free Printable Cursive Dominoes


It happened. My son's fourth grade teacher asked the class to write their spelling words in cursive. (gasp) So I asked him, "How'd you do?"

"Bad."

Oh boy. It seems our cursive practice has come a week or two too late. With that in mind, I cranked out these fun dominoes to help engrain the cursive letter formations in my son's brain.


He's also practicing his cursive penmanship with This Reading Mama's FREE Cursive Handwriting Worksheets.

Preparation
I like to make my dominoes nice and thick but it's unnecessary. You can always just laminate and cut apart for extra durability. If you like the look of ours, here's how I did it.

Print the 5-page PDF onto heavyweight cardstock (click here to download the file free from Google Drive).


Apply Foamies glue to the back of the cardstock pages with a foam brush and let dry for 10-15 minutes. I've tried other glues and you have to use a glue specifically for foam. Then apply each page to a sheet of 6mm craft foam.

Using a straight edge, cut the dominoes apart with a craft knife.

Play
We each drew five dominoes from a pile of the upside down dominoes. The youngest player (my 9-year-old son) placed the first domino in front of us. From there we each tried to add another, matching like letters (either manuscript/cursive or upper/lowercase) and butting them up against each other. If we didn't have domino in our hand with a letter that had been played, we kept drawing until we could play.


There were a few times when my son had to stop and ask, "what letter is this?" (I took this as proof that the game was needed.)

Read
My son read a GREAT book after our game. It's a wonderful pairing for this activity, as it's all about cursive. Its history slant makes it perfect for kids that love social studies!

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1 comment:

  1. Also consider the free iPad app READ CURSIVE — a cursive-reading practice app that lets the kids work with letters, words, phrases/sentences, and stories, in increasingly complex cursive fonts: AppStore.com/readcursive

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