How Tracing Pencil styles turn Crayon into Neon (without changing difficulty)

What Tracing Pencil styles are for

Tomorrow Kid’s Tracing Pencil picker is the kid-facing ink layer under every tracing canvas. It never changes how hard a glyph is—corridor width, validation, and Difficulty stay exactly where parents set them. Kids pick a look (and a little tap-sound “voice”) so practice feels like their pencil.

Six styles ship under the canvas via the pencil swatches:

• Crayon (default) — soft Tomorrow Kid green, a gentle thud
• Pencil — fine graphite gray
• Marker — fat bright blue
• Rainbow — a full colour gradient across the stroke
• Glitter — pink ink with sparkles along the finished line
• Neon — teal core with a soft glow halo

Switching pencils can never make a trace harder or easier. Width scale, opacity, rainbow paint, glitter sparkles, and neon glow are cosmetic only. Each style also tweaks the shared tap-sound playback rate so crayon “thuds” and glitter “tinkles”—without changing Settings → Sound toggles.

Where the picker lives

1. Open Tracing from Home (or Words → Trace it, or free Doodle!)
2. Start any glyph, pack, Fun trace, name/word practice, or blank doodle
3. Look under the canvas for the row of round swatches (TracingPencilPicker)
4. Tap a style—the selection saves on this device (tracingPencil) and follows the child across lesson play, packs, Fun, Words shape-trace, and Doodle

No Parental Check gate is required. Grown-ups set help level under Settings → Tracing Difficulty; kids keep the ink.

How it differs from Difficulty (and Sound)

• Pencils — kid swatches under the canvas; cosmetic ink + tap-sound rate
• Tracing Difficulty — parent Settings after the math gate; Auto / Easy / Medium / Hard path width (settings guide)
• Sound settings — Background Music and Tap Sound on/off; pencils do not mute or unmute those toggles

For the Lines → Shapes → ABC lesson path itself, see the main Tracing guide.

A calm way to introduce it at home

1. Finish one Lines glyph together on the default Crayon.
2. Invite your child to try Rainbow or Glitter on the next letter—celebrate the look, not a harder path.
3. Remind them the gray guide is unchanged; only the ink voice changed.
4. Open Doodle! once so they see the same swatches on free paper (no stars, no fail).
5. Leave Difficulty on Auto unless you already locked Easy/Hard on purpose.

What to try next

Let your child pick a “favourite pencil” for the week, then keep the lesson path as the spine. When you are ready, open Tomorrow Kid, start a Tracing glyph, and tap a swatch under the canvas—Crayon through Neon, all cosmetic.