Shaving cream is an inexpensive, fun and motivating therapeutic activity that can easily be used the home and school environment. It is messy but it cleans up easily with a towel!

Shaving cream is a great medium for practicing pre-writing patterns. Pre-writing patterns include waves, hills, crocodile's teeth and pigs tails. Mastering pre-writing patterns is the precursor to developing great handwriting. These shapes form the foundation of our letters so children need to be able to to these patterns smoothly and effortlessly if they are to develop legible handwriting.

It is also a great medium for practicing letter formation. Writing the same letter over and over in an exercise book is boring compared to drawing it in shaving cream.

Shaving cream is great for motivating reluctant writers to have a go at improving their letter formation. Children who refuse to hold a pencil or who hate sitting at the table for any length of time, will often have a go at shaving cream and find that time flies when they are having fun.

Shaving cream is good "messy" fun for the whole family. You can easily set siblings up with their own pile of shaving cream to keep them busy while you help the other child with their visual motor, fine motor or handwriting activities.

This activity is great as it combines, fine motor skills, letter writing practice and a sensory experience. That is a lot of good stuff packed into one activity!

Steps:

1. Create some sight word cards for your child (example: see, me, get, can, for, am, you, said, the, run, do, and). Feel free to use as many or few as you'd like

2. Spray some shaving cream on a large tray and spread it out with a Popsicle stick so it forms a layer on the tray. Give your child a word card and a Popsicle stick and have them trace the word in the shaving cream with the stick

Note: Of course this is a fun activity to do with your fingers as well. However, it takes a little more time because fingers need to be wiped off after each letter. If they aren't, it spreads the shaving cream all around and you can't really make out the letter!