Strengthening Hand Muscles for Writing: Help For Handwriting Skills

Or What to do when your child thinks writing by hand is pure torture

Learn over thirty-five ways to help your child’s handwriting with these handwriting strengthening exercises for writing.

My son’s struggle with handwriting

My oldest son really really disliked writing and seriously fought me about doing any task or school work that required writing.

I know however that he was not just being difficult because holding a pencil and forming letters on a page was truly challenging work for him.

With time, by both strengthening his hand muscles and giving him time to mature, his writing abilities have significantly improved. His handwriting is never going to be super neat, but it is mostly legible now.

Two of my younger kiddos also struggle with fine motor tasks due to decreased strength in their hands and we’ve worked on improving their fine motor skills with the help of an occupational therapist.

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Working on fine motor skills with an Occupational Therapist

Many moons ago, I worked in a pediatric rehab setting as a speech-language pathologist. There I collaborated with some fabulous occupational therapists to improve our student’s writing. While I focused on the content of the student’s writing, the occupational therapist worked on the mechanics and motor planning of writing (how the student held the pencil, including special grips and other accommodations, how to form the letters and strengthening fine motor skills). These occupational therapists taught me that often boys’ fine motor skills just don’t develop as quickly as girls’.

Typically, boys’ gross motor skills develop first instead. Conversely, girls’ fine motor skills tend to develop before their gross motor skills.

Many children don’t have really good fine motor skills until age 8, or even up to age 10, usually, not coincidentally, the same time that they become obsessed with fine motor activities like tiny, intricate Lego and K’nex creations.

You can start working on fine motor skills as soon as your toddler is able to sit in a high chair and eat cheerios, but even if your child is much older, say in upper elementary school, you still have an opportunity to improve his or her fine motor abilities.

Exercises for Strengthening Hand Muscles for Writing

Drawing and Painting:

1. Use an eyedropper to paint a watercolor. I like to use liquid watercolors for this as it creates bright and vibrant paintings.
2. Draw and “paint” in a squishy bag. To make a squishy bag, place some paint, ketchup, pudding, or hair gel (anything that is a thick liquid will work) in a large Ziploc baggie, zip it closed, being sure to get all the air out. Then tape it closed, and place it flat on the table and tape the four sides to the table. When you press your finger against the material in the baggie, it will spread out, allowing you to draw or write.
3. Have him “write” or draw with his finger in a “salt tray”. To write in sand or salt, put a shallow layer of sand or salt in a tray.
4. Color in the lines. Outline simple coloring pages or shapes with white school glue and let it dry completely. Have him color in the lines, when he gets to the line, the crayon will bump against the dried glue, letting him feel as well as see where the lines are.
5. Do crayon rubbings. Place blank paper over the item to do the crayon rubbing of. You can use the same dried glue shapes from above; or cut out shapes from sandpaper; or use dried leaves or other mostly flat objects.

Precision work

1. Practice stringing items on a length of cotton string or yarn. Let your child try beads, cut slices of pool noodles, tube shaped pasta, or fruit loops or round cereal. You can also cut shapes out of felt and make a hole in the middle to string onto long plastic silly straws.
2. Let your child try using children’s tweezers (or small plastic catering tongs) to move materials (like pompoms or counting bears) from a bowl to an empty water bottle with a fairly small opening.
3. Let them experiment with scooping and pouring beans or rice in a big tub or bin. Learn how easy it is to color rice for a sensory bin.
4. Pipe cleaners aren’t just for crafts. Your kids will love bending and twisting pipe cleaners together to create abstract art, animals, or even people.
5. If there are bugs outside, consider letting your kids catch some creepy crawlies using these ball scoopers or get the complete bug catching kit, which has a bunch of fine motor “tools”.
6. Give your kids scrap paper (or junk mail to old magazines) so they work on cutting with scissors. My old crazy edge scrapbooking scissors were very popular with my kids. Need help teaching kids how to use scissors?
7. All kids like “sewing” with plastic canvas or lacing around a foam shape with an embroidery needle and cotton yarn. Or get one of the Melissa and Doug Lacing Kits for younger kids or for older kids.
8. My kids loved it when we’d order a bunch of Chinese food for carry-out and then they would try to use the beginner chopsticks to eat their snacks for the next week. (Wash and reuse the chopsticks.) Also try using the chopsticks to transfer counting toys or beads from one container to another.
9. Encourage play with building blocks and STEM type toys, but you will need to expect many requests for help getting pieces unstuck while your kids are developing their fine motor skills.
10. Give them some tiny stickers to peel and place onto a sheet of paper. My kids also loved these Melissa and Doug Reusable Sticker pages that are like the old Colorforms stickers.

Strengthening

1. Punch holes in scrap paper with a regular hole punch or scrapbooking punch.
2. Shoot popper ball toys. These come in a variety of animals/styles. We have an embarrassing amount of them! My kids (okay, and me too) love to have popper ball battles, which is way more fun if you have extra popper balls.
3. Let her play with play-doh, cloud dough, or kinetic sand using molds and tools. To keep the play-doh fresh (literally and figuratively) make your own and add scented extracts, colors and even glitter. For example, add pumpkin pie spice and orange food coloring for a fall pumpkin dough or use peppermint extract, white powdered tempera paint and silver glitter for a “snow” dough.
4. Grab some wind-up toys to practice winding a tiny spool. Wind-up toys also are a great language activity with siblings that need to work on beginning language skills, like saying the word, “Go”.
5. Unwrap aluminum foil: wrap up a few toys very tightly with a few layers of aluminum foil and then let them unwrap it.
6. Practice “doing and undoing” fasteners like buttons, clasps, keys and fasteners like velcro. Make or purchase a “busy board”
7. Create designs with a geoboard. Stretch rubber bands across the board to make shapes. You can easily make your own geoboard with a 12×12 piece of plywood and 144 nails or screws.

Get a Free Printable with a Month of Hand Strengthening Exercises Below

Make Writing Tasks Less Stressful

Try alternatives to writing with a pencil/pen and paper. For example, using thicker dry-erase markers on a marker board might be easier (and more fun!).

Or try thick sidewalk chalk on vertical chalkboard (see this article for why writing on vertical boards is very developmentally therapeutic)

Unless the subject is “handwriting” where your student is practicing his or her best formation of the letters on paper, try some different ways for your child to communicate the answers.

Here are some more ways to make “writing” less stressful for your reluctant writer:

1. Let him take a test orally, or write down the answers for her as she dictates to you.
2. Or “write” the answers (such as spelling words) with magnetic letters, letter tiles or rubber stamps.
3. Write with their index finger in fine sand, rice, or flour in a tray or on a cookie sheet.
4. Use speech to text apps or software for writing assignments or simply allow them to type assignments into a word processor, such as the free Open Office, which is comparable to Microsoft office.
5. Chunk writing tasks into smaller bits
6. Use writing prompts to reduce anxiety about what to write
7. Use short narration sections for grammar and copywork (all of our Unit Studies have these selected for you)
8. Use pre-writing sheets to brainstorm ideas
9. Let them draw pictures to tell a story instead of sentences, or to create a cartoon strip/graphic novel type of paper.
10. Give them labeled pictures to help with vocabulary and spelling of the words they will need in the assignment. Even just a list of vocabulary words written on a dry erase board can really help their confidence.
11. Make writing fun! Have them write a snail mail letter to a friend or relative or play mad libs games or Telestrations.

To begin working on correct pencil grasp:

1. Encourage using a pincer grasp to pick up tiny items such as cheerios
2. Get very short pencils, crayons, or markers like pipsqueaks (the short length “forces” them into a more correct hand grip)
3. Use q-tips cut in half for painting
4. Try these triangular shaped crayons or fat pencils to help with correct grip
5. Put fun pencil grips on all of their writing utensils

I hope these exercises will help your child’s handwriting and fine motor skills

Finally, make sure it’s not a language-based writing issue. If you suspect a language problem, consult a Speech-Language Pathologist. (Find a local SLP here)

If you suspect a motor planning problem, consult an Occupational Therapist. (Find a local OT here)

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