Thanksgiving Tracing Worksheets for Preschool Fine Motor Practice
These Thanksgiving tracing worksheets give preschoolers a turkey, a pumpkin, a slice of pie and 13 more fall pictures to trace. Each page has one big picture made of dashed lines and a short sentence to trace at the bottom, like “I can trace a pumpkin.”
Every picture comes twice: once filled in with color and once as a plain black-and-white outline. That makes the set easy to use with a whole group, even when kids are at very different places with a pencil.
Why Tracing Comes Before Writing
Before kids can write letters, they need control over a handful of basic strokes: straight lines up and down, lines across, curves, circles and diagonals. Letters are built from those same strokes, so tracing pictures is practice for writing without the pressure of getting a letter right.
The pictures in this set cover all of them. The corn and the football are mostly long straight lines. The pumpkin, the pie and the turkey feathers are curves. The leaf, the gnome hat and the slice of pie have diagonals and corners, where the pencil has to stop and change direction. The cornucopia and the Thanksgiving dinner plate mix everything together.
The Sentence at the Bottom
Each page ends with a sentence in dotted letters, like “I can trace a slice of pie.” Tracing it gives kids practice forming real letters with the right starting points, and the picture right above it helps them read the last word.
For kids who are not ready for letters yet, skip the sentence and read it to them instead. They can come back to it later.
Setting Kids Up to Succeed
A few small things make tracing go a lot better:
- Trace with a finger first. Running a finger along the dashed line shows kids where the line goes before they pick up a pencil.
- Hold the paper with the helper hand. Kids who keep their other hand flat on the page have far fewer slips and torn papers.
- Go slow. Tracing is about staying on the line, not finishing first. It is fine to stop and pick up again.
- Try short crayons or broken crayon pieces. They are hard to hold in a fist, which nudges kids toward a pencil grip with their fingertips.
Going off the line is part of learning. The goal is getting a little closer each time.
Making It Easier or Harder
Start with the color pages. The colored picture gives kids a clear shape to follow, so the dashed lines are easy to see. When that feels easy, move to the black-and-white outlines, which have nothing to lean on but the dashes.
Pick the order of pictures, too. Start with the pages that are mostly straight lines, like the corn, feather and football. Move on to curves, like the pumpkin and pie. Save the busiest pictures, like the cornucopia, the turkey and the Thanksgiving dinner, for last.
For kids who need more of a challenge, have them trace each line twice in two different colors, then color in the outline pages when they finish.
Ways to Use Them in November
- A fine motor center for the weeks before Thanksgiving, with a few pages out at a time.
- Morning work. Each page takes just a few minutes.
- A reusable center. Slide a page into a sheet protector and trace with a dry-erase marker so it can be wiped and used again.
- A Thanksgiving week take-home packet with a handful of the color and outline pages.
What’s in the Set
- 16 pictures: turkey, turkey face, turkey leg, Thanksgiving dinner, acorn, cornucopia, corn, feather, football, gnome, gourd, leaf, pie, slice of pie, pumpkin and sunflower
- A color page and a black-and-white page for each picture (32 pages)
- An “I can trace a ___” sentence on every page
Grab the Printable
Get all 16 Thanksgiving tracing pictures in my shop.
More Thanksgiving Activities
