Thank you for all your suggestions. I will absolutely listen to those talks. I guess he is so advanced in other areas I just expect he will get grade level work easily. I think we will have a little break, at the moment when I get out the book he moans. He loves the writing section, but not the stories. After a short break I'll just reassess my expectations, and try going slower. He has great comprehension with the story of the world books, he reads them himself, can answer all the questions and will do beautiful narrations from that, so there's lots of positives from that. We will just continue to work on those very important listening skills. Thank you again for the advice!!!

No I haven't listened to her talk, you don't have a link do you? Or the title of the talk? Thank you!!

My first grader is working through wwe 1 and we are having serious issues with the narrations. Once I've read it aloud to him, I would be lucky if he could correctly answer more than three questions. If he can't answer the question, I will reread the one or two sentence that contain the answer. He will generally answer correctly after that, but then I am doing that for all the remaining questions. If he knows the answer he will respond with beautiful full sentences, but sometimes I feel like the language in the passages are so descriptive and detailed that he loses sight of the main points. Any suggestions? Should I take a break and try again when he's older? Can I get him to read the passages himself? His comprehension is great if he is doing the reading, but is the point to practice comprehension from listening too? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

We are using www.artventure.com.au It teaches drawing and uses watercolour. My son is enjoying it and we have seen great improvement in his drawing and painting skills.

Wow, thank you so much for all your replies. I'm just new to this group and the support is amazing thank you! I truely appreciate all your suggestions. Homeagain, thank you for the link, I will absolutely give that method a try. Tanaqui, We used to do a lot of those things when he was younger, but we moved countries had another baby and most of those activities were forgotten about, but I will definitely get him doing those things again. Thank you for the reminder. There is no way I could slow him down with his writing, at least his individual writing. He asked me just before his third birthday if I would teach him to write. I told him he was to young, so he decided to teach himself. He did a great job except he wasn't forming some of his letters correctly. That's when we bought hwt k. We did a page a day then had a big break before I bought the grade 1 book. He absolutely loves writing. He has rest time and he will write pages and pages of letters or stories. I don't want to discourage him from writing, I think I'm lucky to have a boy who loves to write and it came so naturally to him. I just need to get on top of the pencil grip issue. Rosie, I did a check of his palmier reflex and he didn't react to the test. I'm not an expert but I'm assuming he doesn't have it. Amybaez, thank you commenting! He is writing really well, that's why I think he gets so frustrated because, especially for a four year old his writing is beautiful, well I think so. Sometime you can't tell the difference between his writing and mine. I visited your website and saw the article about using the wrist to draw circles. I'm not 100% sure I know what your referring to. It looks fine to me. I've uploaded a video to YouTube if you want to take a look; Jacqui, I would call it a thumb wrap. His pointer and middle are in the correct position, just not the thumb. I'm in the same board, I don't have a tripod grip either. I guess I just don't want him to get into any bad habits and it hinder him later on.

Thank you for all your replies! I feel totally out of my depth with what seems like such a simple problem. He picked up handwritting so quickly that I obviously missed the deterioration in his pencil grip. I was hoping, like you said mumastephanina, that he would naturally find the correct grip but I to have an 'ineffective grip', not that I feel like it hinders my writing, but obviously I want to do the best/right thing for my son. Thank you for the link Lace, I have a friend that is an OT and she dropped something similar over last night so we gave that a go today. He hated it but we will persist. Tiny tribe, I have tried showing him the pictures, we listen to the song, we've watched the video and we practice holding pencils correctly. If I ask him to show me a correct grip he can do it and he knows what he is supposed to do. However, as soon as he writes a letter with the correct grip he automatically switches back to his way. So every letter I am reminding him to correct his grip. He gets so annoyed. I feel like I am patient with him but he just ends up in tears. We are only doing one page of the hwt grade 1 book, so sometimes that is only 7 letters and he still crys. Tanaqi, we have tried the golf pencils, but the grip is the same. We stopped using them because he writes so much in his free time we were going through the little pencils so fast. Thank you all for your suggestions! I will keep persisting, hopefully he will work out quickly that just because he crys doesn't mean it's ok to do an ineffective grip??? We will see how he goes. Thank you

Hi, I'm lost on what to do with my almost 5 year old son. Any advice would be much appreciated. My son has great, even beautiful handwriting for a four year old, however he refuses to hold his pencil properly. When I remind him during penmanship practice (we use hwt) he gets very upset. At the moment he loves writing and will write pages of stories during his free time. He would not be using correct pencil grip during this time and I don't want to discourage his natural love of writing by making his penmanship practice a chore. I've attached a photo of his current pencil grip. Do I continue to require him to hold his pencil in the correct tripod position during lessons or can I just let him continue with what works for him? Danielle