Activities for Pencil Grip Improvement

The following activities are of the kind that will help develop the muscles in your child’s hands that are necessary to grasp a pencil properly. This same strengthening of the muscles will help with the use of scissors. These are activities that are easy to use at home. We use them in preschool and free play, so your child is comfortable with the idea behind them.Provide really short pieces of chalk or broken crayons for coloring with. It really makes a child grip the end well.

• Provide really short pieces of chalk, pencil or broken crayons for coloring with. The shortness makes a child grip the end well.
• Practice the finger plays we do in preschool with your child.
• Spread flat items like cards, or small round objects like buttons or bottle caps on the floor. Turn over the cards, stack/pile or play a game like Go Fish.  Turn over and pick up the buttons or caps. These could also be placed in egg cartons, bowls, recycled cans, ice trays, etc. Playing dominoes is a great game for this – flipping over, picking up and placing. Make dominoes from recycled cardboard boxes. Write ABC, numbers, shapes or colors, etc.
• Provide kitchen tongs to pick up small items like mini-marshmallows, blocks or pom-poms.  These can be placed in bowls, egg cartons, ice cube trays, etc.
• Provide spring loaded clothespins and clip whatever you can think of. Pictures on cardboard, sock pairs together, face towels, etc. Or label around the edge of a paper plate and have child clip what is called out.
• Push objects like straws,  sticks, or pencils into play dough, or through the holes in a colander/salad spinner.
• Provide anything with holes (buttons, beads, cereal, pasta, pool noodles) to thread on string, pipe cleaners or yarn.
• Make lacing shapes from recycled cardboard. Old shoe laces work really well to with a nice clean/tight end for lacing.