Kids who have sensory issues typically struggle with hand writing. Holding a pencil or crayon is difficult for many reasons. Some grasp too tightly, some hold too loosely, some place their fingers too far down or too far up on the pencil, and some lack the grasping muscles to hold it correctly, instead using a full handed grab.
Developing the proper way to hold a pencil is critical for school success. You can start working on proper grasp and developing hand muscles with simple toys at home. Also, talk with your OT about what specifically your child needs and more specific toys that can help.
Here are 6 toys that you can easily start with to help your child develop proper pincer grasp and strengthen hand muscles.
I’ve mentioned Paint By Sticker Books in this article, and I cannot recommend them enough for developing pincer grasp. Having your little ones use their index and thumb fingers to grasp the stickers will reinforce proper pincer grasp. Another technique is to tape the sticker sheet to the wall. By placing stickers on a vertical surface, it will develop their wrist muscles that are used when writing.
Therapy putty is an easy and fun way to increase fine motor skills, develop hand muscles, increase flexibility, and strengthen grip. Kids will see it as silly putty making them WANT to play with it. There are 4 strengths, so make sure to start with extra soft and work their way up. If you start with a strength that is too difficult for them, they may not want to come back and play with it in the future. Be careful where they play with this as it does get in carpet, on furniture, and on clothes and doesn’t come off very easily.
Creativity for Kids Tape-a-Doodle is a fun way to use their pincer grip and wrist muscles to create fun crafts. Though this isn’t exactly how you hold a pencil, using this type of tape develops pincer grasp and other fine motor muscles used when writing. Not only do you tape with this craft, but it’s a journal you can write inside. Yeah!! Two-for-one…. writing and fun!!
LEGO Mosaics takes the smallest pieces of LEGO’s and turns them into mosaics by a child following a pattern on a card. This LEGO game is hours of fun and really utilizes pincer grasp and eye-hand coordination. The original LEGO Mosaics is quite expensive. I found other options here and here that are not exactly the same, but use the same concept.
The Sneaky, Snacky, Squirrel Game is a great game that uses squirrels like tweezers and eye-hand coordination to balance small objects onto holes. This is great for working that pincer grasp. Another game that comes to mind is Operation Game, which uses even smaller tweezers. You can easily create games on your own using kid friendly tweezers. Have kids pick up colored Pom Poms and place them in corresponding colored bins. You can even have kids use tweezers to pick up the pieces of Connect 4 to work their pincer grasp.
