Three pieces of furniture in our house are permanently decorated with my eldest child’s name. Almost illegible letters, but his name as he saw it at three. Before a child picks up a pencil with any kind of intention, a lot has already happened. They’ve watched you write shopping lists and birthday cards. They’ve scribbled on paper and called it a cat. They’ve asked what letters say on cereal boxes and road signs. Pre-writing isn’t a formal stage with a start date — it’s everything that comes before a child is ready to form letters, and most of it happens without you doing anything deliberate at all.
That said, there’s plenty you can do to support it. None of it looks like lessons.
Mark-making
Mark-making is the earliest form of written expression — the stage where a child starts actively trying to put something on paper. Squiggles, shapes, lines, upside-down and backwards letters: it all counts. In school settings, this is called emergent writing, but at home it just looks like drawing, which is exactly what it should look like.
The best thing you can do is make the materials available and get out of the way. Blank paper, things to draw with, the odd shape or letter to trace if they’re interested and then let them lead. If they want to write numbers in the middle of an alphabet sheet or draw shapes instead of dotting the dots, that’s fine. The point is that they’re using their hands to make marks, building the muscle memory and spatial awareness that writing will later need.
A note on siblings: if you have older children already writing, mark-making is a natural shared activity. Older learners can experiment with lettering styles or create illustrated work alongside a younger child who is still in the scribble stage. Nobody needs to know there are two different lessons happening.
Reading together
Letter recognition comes before letter formation, and reading aloud together is one of the most effective ways to build it passively. You don’t need to turn every story into a lesson but pointing out letters as you go, asking a child to find all the ‘a’s on a page, or simply reading books with rhyme and repetition builds familiarity with how letters look and sound together.
For children who aren’t yet interested in letters, the pictures are doing work too. Talking about what’s happening in an illustration introduces vocabulary, builds comprehension, and gives them a reason to engage with the page. That’s all reading readiness.
Choose books with strong sounds and rhythms, illustrations worth looking at, and stories worth revisiting. A child who asks to hear the same book forty times is processing the words.
Telling stories before writing them
One of the most underused pre-writing activities is the simplest: ask your child to tell you a story, and write it down for them. Read it back. Watch them register that their words became marks on a page that you can retrieve. This is the foundational insight of literacy — that writing captures speech — and children who understand it before they can write have a significant head start.
If your child finds verbal storytelling tricky, start with pictures. Ask them to describe what’s happening in something they’ve drawn, write it down in story form, and hand it back to them as a finished piece. Some children will want to illustrate it again. Let them.
Introducing a keyboard
Handwriting is physically difficult before the fine motor skills are there, and frustration with the mechanics can put children off writing altogether before they’ve really started. A keyboard removes that barrier. Typing helps children explore letter recognition and the connection between letters and words without the pencil-grip problem getting in the way.
This isn’t instead of handwriting — it’s alongside it, at a stage where the goal is enthusiasm for written expression, not perfect letter formation. There’s more on this in how typing can make writing easier.
On formal writing before seven
If you’re wondering whether your child should be doing more structured writing work and they’re under seven, the short answer is probably not yet. The research on early formal literacy instruction is fairly consistent: there’s no long-term advantage to starting written work early, and some evidence that pressure at this stage creates anxiety that persists. Academic Building Blocks covers this in more detail.
What matters at the pre-writing stage is that your child is curious about letters, comfortable with mark-making, and surrounded by books. The formal work comes later. When they’re ready, you’ll know: they’ll just start writing.
When you’re ready to move on: How to Teach Writing at Home.
If your child is left-handed, they may need more support. This post’s for that.
