My DS has always had handwriting issues and strength issues - yet has a beautiful grip. At 3 we worked on it with triangle pencils and pencil grips. So while I agree with Portia and others about the need for the functional grip - there are potentially still problems with the writing that can be remediated in other ways.
For my DS 7 the issues were size, space and quality and shape of the letters. With OT and hard work on his part he has made considerable improvements in some of these issues. The thing that has been most effective for him with size and spacing has been using graph paper - the boxes give him the dimensionality and force him to leave a space between words rather than between letters.Without the boundaries, like on unlined paper, his letters are enormous. This is a problem on worksheets in math - he runs out of room. What has not improved is the use of random capitalization of certain letters - D and B in particular - when doing it lowercase he will often reverse them. And the letters are always different, he has no consistency in remembrance of shape
Interesting that a lot here like mechanical pencils - DS leans on them or uses so much pressure that he breaks lead in them constantly, so much so we stopped having him use them.
Very fortunate this year - DS teacher is not penalizing him for his writing issues - his report card ignored it and gave him the grade his content deserved - I was shocked - that was not the case last year. And DS was so pleased to get the at grade level rating rather than below.
DeHe
