Pencil grip experts! Inwardly bent thumb?

[LynnG in Arizona]

I am just starting to work with my boy. He turned 4 just two weeks ago, and we are starting gentle preschool with him this year. Just HWT Pre-K and All About Reading Pre-1.

 

I'm trying to get him to work on a nice pencil grip, and he does something strange I've never seen before: he holds the pencil/crayon in a basic tripod grip (or something close to it, anyway), but his thumb bends inward. So instead of seeing the thumb knuckle, the entire thumb curves down. If I correct him, he just goes back to the inwardly bent thumb almost immediately.

 

Yes, I know he is young . . . but I have learned the hard way from my older girls that I had better start working on this now rather than let them develop their own bizarre pencil grip!

 

We are following most of the HWT tips/rules for pencil grip. They worked well on my now 5 year old.

 

Not sure if this means he is not physically ready to do a proper pencil grip, or if his thumb is unusually long, or what. :confused:

 

Any advice or suggestions?

 

I even Googled this strange grip, and found pictures of probably 15 varieties of poor pencil grips . . . but not a single example of an inwardly curved thumb.

[weddell]

I don't know, but have you tried using a pencil grip?

These are the ones we have:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001SN8HPI/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B001SN8HPS&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=09CX8484SB7MDJN19Z79

It makes it pretty hard to hold a pencil wrong. Maybe it would work to get him used to the feel holding the pencil correctly and then get rid of it. I would probably try and correct his grip now just like you are thinking.

[Ellie]

It's just a habit. Habits like this start young. :glare: I'd say just continue to gently correct and re-correct and re-correct.

 

He probably holds a fork/spoon similarly. I've noticed that people tend to hold their eating implements pretty much the same way they hold writing implements.

[boscopup]

My son does the thumb wrap thing, and I can't stand to look at it. Seriously, seeing it is like nails on a chalk board! It's habit, definitely. I've tried correcting it, but he so quickly reverts to the thumb wrap. His handwriting is better with the wrapped thumb, but then again, his handwriting isn't beautiful either way, and he tires easily (possibly because the thumb wrap isn't the most efficient way to hold a pencil).

 

I've thought about pencil grips... I recently switched him to a mechanical pencil, which he likes. Is there a pencil grip that fits a mechanical pencil and would discourage a wrapped thumb? Or do they all go on wooden pencils?

[ukfan78]

I totally understand and I would definitely start working on it now. My son is 10 and has a weird grip that drives me bonkers! I was thinking about getting some pencil grips for him. He seems to write very slow when I ask him to hold it better, but also writes kind of slow his way as well. Is he too old to change his grip or could he learn to correctly hold a pencil still?

 

Melissa

[Zamis]

I remember having an issue with my son at that age. It seems to me i remember that the more he started writing, the more comfortable he got. Practice makes perfect I guess :)

[SonshineLearner]

Have you been doing the Pencil Flip? (it's in the teacher's book for HWOT) IF you do this, does he still hold the pencil incorrectly? Just a thought ;)

[boscopup]

The exercise I tried with her was a pencil tug of war. You both hold one end of the pencil between your thumb and index finger, which should be making an "O" shape. The goal is to not let your "O" collapse flat when you're pulling on your end of the pencil. First one to flatten loses.

 

This sounds like something my kids would play... with a sharpened pencil. First one to get stabbed loses. :lol:

 

I do have an unsharpened pencil here I could try that with. ;)

[Guest]

My daughter hyperextended her thumb -- still does, actually -- as you describe. We went through a year of OT in which the OT tried valiantly but in vain to correct it. We used about fifty different kinds of pencil grips. We had an educational therapist.

 

Here is the outcome: while dd's grip could be made to approximate a correct grip through various strategies -- one particular grip, cutting off all her pencils and crayons to golf-pencil size, having her write only on a slanted surface -- she hated it so much that she just stopped writing. All the stories, plays, songs, letters, lists, and even drawings that flowed from her and overtook all horizontal surfaces in the house just stopped.

 

I made the decision that I'd rather have her love to write than have a perfect grip, so I let her go. As she got older and her hands got a lot stronger, the hand pain she had when she was little disappeared. Her handwriting is actually quite lovely and she can write fast, although she still presses hard on the page; mechanical pencils are always breaking despite all our months and months of pressure exercises. She's slowly learning to type (doesn't hyperextend her thumb with the keyboard, so there's a possible option).

 

I made a point to look at all kinds of people's writing grips over the years, and I was absolutely astonished at how well most people manage to function with some pretty horrible grips. Watch waiters in a restaurant sometime; it's eye-opening!

 

I'm sure it is true that for some people, a maladaptive grip leads to a lot of hand pain. This hasn't proven true over the years for dd, for whatever that's worth. For dd, there's a problem with her fingers getting sensory information to and from her brain; it's called finger agnosia, and basically it means she has difficulty "feeling" and understanding the feelings from her fingers. She holds the pencil the way she does to compensate for that, so she can tell what her hand is doing while she writes. It's a very complicated issue, and who knows whether there is one single "right" thing to do in these kinds of cases?

[jenbrdsly]

My daughter hyperextended her thumb -- still does, actually -- as you describe. We went through a year of OT in which the OT tried valiantly but in vain to correct it. We used about fifty different kinds of pencil grips. We had an educational therapist.

 

Here is the outcome: while dd's grip could be made to approximate a correct grip through various strategies -- one particular grip, cutting off all her pencils and crayons to golf-pencil size, having her write only on a slanted surface -- she hated it so much that she just stopped writing. All the stories, plays, songs, letters, lists, and even drawings that flowed from her and overtook all horizontal surfaces in the house just stopped.

 

I made the decision that I'd rather have her love to write than have a perfect grip, so I let her go. As she got older and her hands got a lot stronger, the hand pain she had when she was little disappeared. Her handwriting is actually quite lovely and she can write fast, although she still presses hard on the page; mechanical pencils are always breaking despite all our months and months of pressure exercises. She's slowly learning to type (doesn't hyperextend her thumb with the keyboard, so there's a possible option).

 

I made a point to look at all kinds of people's writing grips over the years, and I was absolutely astonished at how well most people manage to function with some pretty horrible grips. Watch waiters in a restaurant sometime; it's eye-opening!

 

I'm sure it is true that for some people, a maladaptive grip leads to a lot of hand pain. This hasn't proven true over the years for dd, for whatever that's worth. For dd, there's a problem with her fingers getting sensory information to and from her brain; it's called finger agnosia, and basically it means she has difficulty "feeling" and understanding the feelings from her fingers. She holds the pencil the way she does to compensate for that, so she can tell what her hand is doing while she writes. It's a very complicated issue, and who knows whether there is one single "right" thing to do in these kinds of cases?

 

 

This was interesting. I'm always watching people on tv's pencil grip too, especially left handers.

[LynnG in Arizona]

My daughter hyperextended her thumb -- still does, actually -- as you describe. We went through a year of OT in which the OT tried valiantly but in vain to correct it. We used about fifty different kinds of pencil grips. We had an educational therapist.

 

Here is the outcome: while dd's grip could be made to approximate a correct grip through various strategies -- one particular grip, cutting off all her pencils and crayons to golf-pencil size, having her write only on a slanted surface -- she hated it so much that she just stopped writing. All the stories, plays, songs, letters, lists, and even drawings that flowed from her and overtook all horizontal surfaces in the house just stopped.

 

I made the decision that I'd rather have her love to write than have a perfect grip, so I let her go. As she got older and her hands got a lot stronger, the hand pain she had when she was little disappeared. Her handwriting is actually quite lovely and she can write fast, although she still presses hard on the page; mechanical pencils are always breaking despite all our months and months of pressure exercises. She's slowly learning to type (doesn't hyperextend her thumb with the keyboard, so there's a possible option).

 

I made a point to look at all kinds of people's writing grips over the years, and I was absolutely astonished at how well most people manage to function with some pretty horrible grips. Watch waiters in a restaurant sometime; it's eye-opening!

 

I'm sure it is true that for some people, a maladaptive grip leads to a lot of hand pain. This hasn't proven true over the years for dd, for whatever that's worth. For dd, there's a problem with her fingers getting sensory information to and from her brain; it's called finger agnosia, and basically it means she has difficulty "feeling" and understanding the feelings from her fingers. She holds the pencil the way she does to compensate for that, so she can tell what her hand is doing while she writes. It's a very complicated issue, and who knows whether there is one single "right" thing to do in these kinds of cases?

 

Thanks for sharing your story! It's nice to meet somebody else whose child had the exact same issue. I wish I could put my finger on why my boy does this. I have a feeling it's something about extra long fingers, or some anatomical reason . . . ?

 

Uggh, I hate these pencil grip issues! I wish I could just pack my boy off to work with the HWT people for a while until they get him straightened out. ;) (Not really, but you kwim.)

 

Thanks to all who have

[PeterPan]

We just had a thread about handwriting on the SN board where NCW mentioned the technique at this site: http://www.thehandwritingclinic.com/CM/Brochures/Files/Final%20First%20strokes%20catalog%202011%20COLOR%20version.pdf Scroll way down through the document to find it.