The Alphabet Tracing Sheets Busy Bag from our Busy Bag Swap has been one of the children’s favorites. It’s perfect for Kaitlynn (4) as she loves to practice drawing her letters. Silas has also enjoyed trying to write the letters, too.
Secretly, though, I think one reason it’s their favorite is because it involves markers–something usually off-limits at our house. 
This Busy Bag just involves a laminated page or two of some type of numbers or letters (you could also do shapes or cursive) and a dry erase marker or crayon. You could also include some sort of eraser. Ours didn’t have an eraser, so we just use a cloth or baby wipe.
The beauty of this is that you can use it again and again and again! If you don’t have a laminator or don’t want to mess with laminating the sheets, you could just put them in page protectors and it would work almost as well. If you wanted to do more than a few pages, you could stick them in a three-ring binder for hours of tracing practice!
Download the Alphabet Tracing Sheets here. There are also free alphabet and number tracing pages here and here. If you want tracing pages for individual letters, you can find some of those here. Find more Busy Bag ideas here.
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LOVE this idea~~~ thanks so much for sharing.. Perfect for my 4 year old right now!!!! Downloading printables now~~~
These are so great! And I just picked a couple up in the $1 aisle at Target!
great practice!!!thanks for sharing!!!
What a wonderful idea! It seems like we go through so much paper it would be nice to cut back!
I just wanted to say THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!!! I have been wanting to BUY the dry erase books but they are soooo flippin expensive!!! This will allow me to do ALL the workbook lesson plans with my boys over & over WITHOUT wasting a ton of ink!!!!
You are so welcome!
Great idea! This would be a great project for my friend’s reading club. Thank-you so much!
You can use an old sock for an eraser. Then you can store the markers in the sock.
I second the sock idea. That’s what we did in the classroom. More than likely you have a sock that is missing it’s pair and it’s perfect for them to put on their hand to erase with and not get as much of the marker residue on them.
Neat idea! I tried the erasers, they don’t last long. I hate having the wet rags all over, and wipes can get expensive! An old sock, and then using it for storage is a wonderful idea! And I also like the idea of reusing something that would otherwise just get thrown away!
We use a lot of laminated sheets in my classroom for practice too. If you have used dryer sheets or shout color catchers, those make awesome erasers for the dry erase markers.
We use used dryer sheets or shout color catchers as erasers in my classroom.
What a great idea!
I’m a teacher and we use old clean socks (missing match) as white board erasers. I’m not sure how well it works on a ziplock but it’s worth a try!
You can also use smooth plastic page protectors (the textured ones aren’t very good) if you don’t have a laminating machine. In fact, my kids think it erases much easier than our laminated things and I totally agree with them. Add everything to a binder and it makes for a lot of choices each time.
I love this idea. I’m trying to find more busy bag ideas for my four-year-old. Any suggestions?
I’ve been using my laminator for erase sheets for years my oldest daughter had a problem keeping track of what assignments from school were due when so I printed out a Week calander and we write down when each test is for that week and at the end of the week she gets a sense of accomplishment as she can erase away all the tests and big assignments she had to have done…. like a clean slate to go into the weekend with. I never thought of the ziplock bag though neat idea.
So simple yet something I wouldn’t have thought of. Love all these ideas you’ve been sharing. Thanks!
What is it with kids and markers?! Our daughter is obsessed with them and has been for years. We also made them off-limits long ago and she looks at the jar longingly as though they’re the best thing ever invented.
Markers were off limits for a long time in our house, too. I discovered, though the the Expo WASHABLE dry-erase markers really do come off everything pretty easily.
That is brilliant!
At our house, we use sturdy white 3-ring “view” binders from Sam’s as a kind of dry erase lap board… We slide educational printables or coloring pages inside the front and/or back covers and then use dry erase crayons (don’t smudge as easily or smell) to fill them out or color. We store the crayons inside windowed “pencil pocket thingies” obtained at Wal-mart for $.97 each, and the girls are all set! I love the old sock eraser idea! The mitts that come with dry erase crayons don’t work very well, so I stitched a rectangular “mitt” from a micro-fibre towel for each of them. Old socks would have worked just as well!
The irresistible lure of markers always reminds me of Robert Munsch’s book Purple Green and Yellow, with its super-indelible-never-come-off until-you’re-dead-and-maybe-even-later markers!
Awesome, I already printed some and my tots are now tracing their letters as we speak.
You can mock-laminate pages easily at home for write on/wipe off pages. I print on cardstock and then just use strips of heavy packing tape to ‘laminate’. I have a tape ‘gun’ that makes it faster. Just place the strips over the page, slightly overlapping them, making sure to leave a little edge around the whole page. Trim to neaten when you are done. It works great for us!