Learning the pencil grip

I’m Kirsty Brocklehurst and I’m a Children’s Physiotherapist and I’m Sally Hillis-Davis and I’m a Children’s Occupational Therapist and we are the Practical Child. We’re going to be sharing some common issues around child development and our top tips for how you can help.

Hi, my top tip today is all about pencil skills and a quick and easy way to help your school-age children to achieve a good pencil grip. Pencil grips have really important to actually help children with their flow of writing and a good way to get them to get a good tripod grip is this is called the web space of your thumb and put the pencil into the web space and bring the fingers round. And that’s a really good pen grip pencil as a test at the moment.

If your children are really struggling with that, there are things called pencil grips, and there’s a number of different ones that we have to try out. Now, what I always advise parents to do, if they’re going to try trial pen grip says, buy a mixed pack, which is what we’ve got here, because you never know which one’s going to suit your child.

I really liked this one because it’s simple. It doesn’t matter actually you can turn the pencil around and your child can hold the pencil really nicely here with this grip. So that’s quite good.

I tend to put the marking of the pencil up the top. So it gives children an extra visual prompt as where to put your fingers.

This one’s really nice. It’s quite tactile actually. It’s got quite a nice feel to it. And some children really are funny about the field of pencil. So it’s quite good to just again, try these out. This one’s quite nice as spongy and just quite tactile. I really liked this one, but this is my fever five favorite for me to use

This one’s really good for children that are really struggling to know where their fingers are. You actually put your fingers in them and it secures your fingers in place. It’s not particularly comfortable. I don’t like it. But as I say, for lots of children who try and move their fingers around a lot, it’s really helpful because it gives them good stable base to put their fingers in.

This one, again is quite tactile. It’s got almost like, little wing care to put your fingers in, and that does keep them nicely in place. It’s quite spongy. Again, that’s quite a nice one to use and you can see with all of them, it automatically puts the pencil in the webspace, which is really what you want.

This one, lots of schools. I go into schools and lots of children who use these. I’m not the greatest fan of this one because it’s got three different points on it. And it’s quite hard to work out where your fingers are going to go. And I’ve put again, this here the writing. So I can see where I meant to place my fingers. But again, it’s, it’s not the easiest one to use. That’s quite small though.

And another triangular one is nice, nice and soft. You can also get triangular pencils, which are really useful and put your children in a good position, their finger in a good position there.

So as I say, the best tip is to start with this in the web space, put your fingers in together and hopefully your child will achieve that grip. But if not try out these.