I know it's been a while since I have posted but between college and homeschooling I've been pretty busy. Anyhow, one of the things I have been dealing with is inefficient pencil grasp. I've never had this problem before but it's making writing very difficult to the point that if he can verbalize it when his hand is tired I write what he's dictated or drawn in the air or pointed out. Anyhow, I wanted to share some ways that I have dealt with some of this to ease some frustration on his behalf but also to develop his skills educationally as well as small motor skills through education.
The first thing I did was because he couldn't figure out sometimes the name of a letter and draw it he could identify it if it was written out. So for spelling I quit using the typically lined paper and began printing my own stationary. When he ends up getting frustrated because he can't think of the name to go with the sound of the letter he can point it out. This was very simple to make by taking a word document and typing both the upper and lower case letters. My son also knew the combination sounds such as 'th', 'ch', and 'sh' but he could only identify them when they were written down separately from other words. So I added combination sounds to the bottom of the page and this is what I got.
We began using Handwriting Without Tears which is an AWESOME program if you didn't know. However, I couldn't just stop what I was doing to work on his finger grasp and at the same time I couldn't stand any more melt downs either. So I looked on the web for some solutions and realized that clothes pins worked well to develop the right grasp for pencils. I had gotten a bunch from the dollar store and didn't have to use all of them and so they got put up and I had forgotten about them until tonight. Then I began trying to figure out how to put letters and numbers on them. I didn't want to write them on them but I remembered I had these stickers that had letters so I went to investigate and I found these
PHOTO TO COME SOON
I began placing the stickers on both sides of the clothes pins so that one pin on both sides had the same letter like this.
PHOTO TO COME SOON
I then took them and put them in a plastic bin but you can put them in a shoe box or whatever. Now for spelling I can place the pins on one side of the box/bin in order and then have him pick them out and spell the word all while working on his small motor skills and pencil grasp without him even knowing and still accomplishing his regular school work.
I am also planning on doing the same for his numbers as well for him to do his math school work but I'm looking for number stickers that are small enough to put on clothes pins. I might use my labeler to do this if I can't find stickers but I like the sticker idea just because it allows more color to be on the clothes pins. If you wanted to you could paint them as well to add more color.
Another idea that might work for your child is coloring your pins that are vowels a separate color from the consonants.
