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Motor skills: pliers are important for learning to write
There aren’t ten different ways to hold a pen securely: only one is effective because it provides flexible wrist support. However, it is this flexibility which allows, later, to write quickly, legibly, and for a long time. A child who is tense, or who tires his wrist, will one day have trouble taking his notes in college or high school, but by then it will be too late to correct it easily.
The right gripper is therefore this one: the thumb and forefinger both grip the pencil, without joining. Together they hold the pen all by itself: the other fingers are just there to serve as a support, but we must be able to hold the pencil with this single pliers and move the other three fingers underneath. Make the child feel that he can hold his pencil only with these two fingers: this will force him to position the thumb and forefinger correctly, preventing them from meeting nail to nail on the pen. At first, it may be helpful to draw a red dot on the first joint of the middle finger (where adults have the callus of the pen). The instruction is to try to hide this point by the pen by holding the pliers as indicated.
The famous broken wrist: be careful!
Second, the pencil must be held in the axis of the arm: war must be waged with a broken wrist, especially among left-handed people, for whom it is the natural tendency. It is an endlessly renewed battle, but the stakes are well worth it. Try for yourself to hold your hand folded like a snail against your wrist, and feel the muscular and tendon tensions on the top; it hurts, it heats up, and later it will end in writer’s cramp. So, for a well aligned wrist, we visualize a large pheasant feather which starts from the pen and which tickles the shoulder; the ideal is to get a real one to tape on a pencil to make the child feel the position of the resulting wrist. The pheasant feather indeed forces the pen to return to a tilted position backwards, in the axis of the forearm, instead of being held vertically to the sheet as children in kindergarten often do. .
Wrist in flight: the other peril
One last point, less important because it can be corrected more easily on its own: the wrist in weightlessness. Here, the child takes off the wrist and stiffens the elbow. It is a great classic of CP, especially in anxious children who apply themselves and harden their gesture. To cure them more quickly, we get a wall calendar that we use as a desk pad by having previously stapled, at the bottom, over the entire width, a 5 to 10 cm strip of very soft fabric, the instruction being: “you must rub your wrist against the soft fabric when you write ”.
Learning to hold a pencil correctly in kindergarten
Everything is played out in kindergarten, because children are given “scripting tools” very early on: brushes, markers, sticks of oily chalk … However, playing with them should not be the door open to all positions of the hand, at the risk of developing bad habits. Because children have a natural tendency to grasp the pencil directly above the sheet, quite vertical, with their fingers tight around it. And how could they do otherwise, with these huge cylinders that are children’s markers? Try writing with a rolling pin, you’ll see… Little fingers are weak. In Canada, the CP is also planning exercises for strengthening the fingers; While waiting for them to arrive in France, the children will therefore be given light pens, thin enough, measuring at least 10 cm so that the felt rests well on the palm of the hand. Otherwise, if it is a “core” of a pencil, the latter will again be held vertically. For brushes, it’s a little different: a thin handle implies an ad hoc brush requiring good line precision. So it is better to offer long sleeves and a little thick brushes enhancing the “thick line”.
What if bad writing habits are taken?
The writing training is done during the first grade: no need to give lines to do at home, it would be indigestion. On the other hand, parents are able to observe their child in detail. Note the stops, spaces between letters, often missed mends to restart the letter after lifting the pen. These positioning errors are different from classic CP pitfalls, such as letters and numbers that turn backwards or start from the wrong place, and which training will correct. Maintenance concerns often go hand in hand with a child who presses too much on the pencil, who writes very slowly, sometimes very thick and not on the lines, sometimes tense, even if the result is readable and therefore acceptable. Then try to make the gesture more fluid by asking the child to write loops of “e” in series without stopping, in sand, eyes closed on a board (amazing results, the gesture is released!). on a sheet, then small, etc. For the position of the wrist, on the other hand, apart from the play of the pheasant and the soft pad, there is nothing to do, except to resume, again and again, the right position …