The Claw

Wow, that was a long time away. We had a wonderful Christmas, and it seems the break did us all good. We focused on joy during the Holidays, with lots of crafts, decorating, cooking and some really fun fieldtrips.


Here we are mid January, and we are fully back in the swing of things. I've been doing some research on dysgraphia (also known as a visual-motor integration problem, people with dyslexia often have poor, nearly illegible handwriting and often have an unusal pencil grip, often with the thumb on top of the fingers) and asking some questions on messages boards, but nobody can really give me a good answer as to why it is better to change a child's pencil grip to the tripod grip. My husband had asked me in the past not to change Big Brother's grip, so I ignored his somewhat strange grip for awhile. I thought after the break, maybe we could just try getting him to do the tripod grip through the pinch technique, and to my surprise, he was a lot more receptive to it, but I could see he was still struggling, and it was frustrating for both of us. Thankfully, someone suggested the "writing claw". It's a device that allows the fingers to hold the pencil in the correct position while writing. In the past, I shied away from those. To me, they looked like some type of torture device, but I went against what I thought was my better judgment and ordered one. When it arrived, the kids were so excited that they got something in the mail, that they immediately started playing with them. I showed Big Brother where to put his fingers and how to position the pencil. He ran and got some paper and I saw him sitting at his table writing with it, and immediately he looked up at me and shrieked, "I love it". What? I thought I would pass out. So all those battles in the early days about his pencil grip could have been avoided. I love this thing too! Anything to make our lives less frustrating. Here is the link to their site. The Writing Claw