Hi,
DD will be 4 in September. She likes letters and thanks to some great ideas on this board, we've done a bit of phonics (mostly playing rhyme games). She knows her upper and lower case letters and can identify sounds within words i.e. she's your average 3.5 year old cognitively speaking.
However ...
She has never much liked drawing, colouring in or writing. She seems to struggle to hold the pen or pencil correctly (or even in a way that allows her to control it at all). I've not pushed her to do it - given her chances to sit and colour in with me and her sister, but she usually chooses to do something else. When she does colour in or try to write, we've praised her a lot. We've tried a couple of ergonomic pencil grips, but they seem to have confused her further.
She is at a nursery pre-school, and I know very well that the 'examples' of her writing that they've produced must have taken a fair bit of help i.e. teacher holding and supporting her hand throughout. This is fine and frankly I'm sure they know far more about what they're doing than I do, but the bottom line is that she still lacks confidence.
Should I be guiding her hand as they do in nursery? I worry that she won't figure out pencil control on her own if I do that.
Does anyone have any fun ideas for ways to build her confidence around holding pencils or crayons?
I must stress that I'm not trying to get her to write when she's not ready, but helping her feel good about doodling / colouring etc. is important to me because it means that she'll choose to practice the skills a bit more often and that will further increase her confidence etc.
I am slightly concerned that she might be dyspraxic because of this and a number of other little things (constantly falling and tripping over, lack of spatial awareness and proprioceptive ability). Maybe I ought to focus on building her confidence in other gross motor / fine motor skills before even thinking about using pencils - what do you think?