Learning how to hold a pencil should be a fun and exciting experience for your child, particularly if Dana Cary, has anything to say about it. Cary is a pediatric occupational therapist and spends her days teaching children all sorts of skills, including the proper pencil grip. After all, learning the right way to hold a pencil is an important milestone in your child’s life and one to look back on (at least by you) fondly. So, at what age should you teach your child how to hold a pencil? Around the age of 3. “In general, you can start working on the right way to hold a pencil around the time you introduce your child to crayons,” says Cary.
Learning how to hold a pencil is a fine motor skill and Cary says the perfect pencil grip can be developed through fun and engaging activities, without your child even realizing they’re working on their pre-writing skill set. What kinds of activities? Things like making a necklace out of Cheerios or peeling tiny stickers — pretty sneaky!
Here are three fun activities to teach your child how to hold a pencil from Dana Cary, pediatric occupational therapist:
- Teach crab fingers and provide fine motor challenges – see 0:52 timestamp in video.
When teaching kid to properly hold a pencil, you need to know what their crab fingers are and Cary demonstrates in the video around 0:52 so that when you say “hold your pencil with crab fingers,” you both know exactly what that means. There are many activities to strengthen fine motor skills, like: giving your child teeny stickers to peel, coins to put in coin slot, having them make a necklace from Cheerios, unwrap a present, or a completing a dot to dot activity. - Play nip and flip – see 2:11 timestamp in video.
This activity involves holding a marker (or crayon or pencil) facing away from your child, using crab fingers to pick it up, aka “nip,” and then flip the marker over. - Practice coloring with broken crayons – see 3:21 timestamp in video.
Yep, it’s a little sad to snap a crayon in half but apparently very worth it!
BUT WAIT! Here are the most important things you need to know before you teach a preschooler how to hold a pencil:
Is there a correct way to hold a pencil?
There isn’t necessarily a right way but there is a gold standard and that’s the dynamic tripod grasp or the dynamic quadrupod grasp.
The dynamic tripod grasp is when a child holds the pencil pinched between the thumb and index finger and the third finger is the support. The quadrupod grasp uses the fourth finger to support. “Many people grow up and hold pencil not using it that way,” says Cary, “but these are considered the gold standard.” So, when looking for the correct pencil grip, either of these will do. Let your child choose what’s most comfortable. But don’t jump to fix anything just yet.
Why is it important to hold a pencil correctly?
It’s really important to hold a pencil correctly because it promotes neat handwriting and allows for quick writing movements. By holding a pencil properly, you won’t experience fatigue as quickly and you won’t damage any joints.
What is the right age to teach your child how to hold a pencil?
“Whenever you introduce a child to a crayon is the right time to introduce a pencil,” says Cary, “this is typically when a child is 3 or 4 years old.” That said, don’t be too quick to correct their grasp. A lot of kids hold a fisted grasp at this age and you don’t need to reposition their fingers.
“I don’t give 3-4 year olds full sized crayons. I give them crayons that I broke into really small pieces or I give them really small pieces of chalk because then they’ll be forced to use their crab fingers,” she explains. Crab fingers are the three fingers they need to develop their coordination and include the thumb, pointer, and middle finger. In the image of a left hand below, the radial fingers include: thumb (not pictured), the pointer finger (green hat) and the middle finger (black hat).
The hand consists of two parts: the radial side, also called the precision side, and the power side. The crab fingers are on the radial side of the hand. These are the “skill fingers” we use to button, unbutton, zip, unzip, and so forth. The power side of the hand consists of the pinky and ring finger (red and yellow hat fingers, respectively, in image). These fingers are responsible for doing any fine motor movement that requires more strength, like squeezing stress ball or making a shape out of play doh. These power fingers support the precision side of the hand and add more strength to whatever task they’re doing. When it comes to fine motor skills, we’re mostly concerned with the radial side.
At what age should your child be able to hold a pencil properly?
Around 5 or 6 years old a kid will have the underlying fine motor skills to hold a pencil maturely. You can help them improve their pencil grip by constantly exposing them to options that challenge their radial side, like: giving them teeny tiny stickers to peel, coins to put in coin slot, ask them to string together a necklace from Cheerios necklace, unwrap a present, or a connect the dots printable. Dot-to-dots also help with visual motor skills, the ability to copy what you see between your eyes and your hand; as well as help improve spatial abilities and drawing straight lines, which is a big benefit as a pre-writing activity.
At what age is it worrisome that a child isn’t holding a pencil correctly?
“A lot of kids aren’t exposed to fine motor tasks when they’re young so they don’t get that type of practice,” says Cary. “If you have a first grade kid who can’t hold a pencil correctly and they’ve been to preschool and kindergarten, that could be something you bring up to your physician.” Cary suggests you say something like: My child is having a hard time holding pencil and I think it could be related to fine motor skills. What do you think? Kindergarten is when they’re specifically working on radial tasks and when most kids learn how to hold a pencil correctly. By the time a child has finished kindergarten, they should know how to hold a pencil correctly.
How do you teach a child to hold a pencil without it hurting?
“Holding a pencil at baseline shouldn’t hurt,” says Cary. What makes it painful for some children (and adults) is if they have joint hyperextension. Often in an attempt to boost stability and write neatly, these children end up altering their grip to compensate. Other kids press really hard down on paper and they’re not aware of it, so they need to learn to be more mindful. In general though, holding a pencil should not be painful.
How can you encourage your preschooler to work on their pencil grip?
Break crayons in half, use golf pencils instead of regular-sized ones, and provide many opportunities to practice skills with the radial side of the hand.
So, now that your child is a pencil-holding genius… when do you start teaching her or him to write?
Well, hang on… once your child knows how to hold a pencil, the next step is to make sure s/he is able to copy prewriting strokes, says Cary. Draw vertical line. Can your child copy it just from watching you draw it? Once your child can draw these five things, they’re ready to learn to write their letters: a vertical line, a horizontal line, a circle, a cross and an X, then you can move on to letters.
“I start with the letter F,” explains Cary, who follows the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum from Learning Without Tears that teaches letters in a specific order and with specific verbiage to guide each stroke.
Looking for a FREE trace the alphabet PDF? Enter your first name and email below to get every single letter for your child.
And, there you have it — three fun activities to teach your child how to hold a pencil properly.
