Teaching young children how to correctly grip a pencil can be a tricky task. There are developmental stages with which one goes through when using writing utensils such as pencils, crayons, and markers and you may be seeing your child go through these stages this year! The “Fisted Grip” is very typical early in the preschool school year and we rarely see this in our students at this point in the year. That then moves into a finger grip which is still common through the winter months. The early version of this is having a light finger grip at the top of the utensil.
With this, it is very hard to control the writing utensil and makes the children tired very quickly while writing. Whenever we see this, we do our best to support the children by moving their hand down on the utensil and reminding them to rest the side of their hand on the table as they write. Eventually this will become second nature to them!
One of the curriculum goals for preschool is to work towards what we call a tripod grip. A tripod grip is where you use three fingers; your thumb, pointer, and middle finger to grip the writing tool.
This is considered the ideal grip with which you can move your hand accurately and efficiently. Another piece to this grip is that your hand is low on the pencil and that it also rests on the table. This is the best way to give your hand the most strength and allows you to write for extended period of time using straight lines instead of getting tired and having very light, squiggly lines.
We are beginning to see lots of low handed finger grips and even the tripod grips and we are so excited for this growth in your children! You will see a lot of handwriting activities coming home with your children, as well as fine motor and hand strengthening activities posted on the blog as these are all skills that we use to work on this pencil grip and handwriting. If they aren’t already, you will see your child beginning to write the letters in their name and our goal is for them to write their name independently by the end of the school year!! They are getting ready to be able to write words and eventually even short sentences when they head to KPrep next year!
