I Want to Hold Your Hand

(I hope you sang that blog title too....!)
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Today I read an article on the Telegraph website:
​Children struggle to hold pens because of excessive use of iPads, claim experts

In the article it states that experts, including paediatric doctors and orthopaedic therapists, are warning that more and more children are entering school without the ability to handle pencils correctly. The article suggests that this is down to more and more use of technology, especially the use of touch screens. Here at Ace Early Years, we do agree that it seems more children are entering our settings with poor motor skills. We could spend the rest of this blog bemoaning this but that probably wouldn't be useful! In the end, as much as we might like, we don't quite have the influence to change society! However, we can change what happens in our settings, so we thought it would be more useful to explain how we support children with developing the motor skills!

So if we want children to have spectacular pencil control then they will need to have good control over their whole body - for example good 'core muscles' to hold themselves up. We've put together some of our favourite activities for developing gross motor skills - click on the picture to find them! You'll notice that most of them take place outside! We firmly believe that children learn best outside - and while we don't 'teach' gross motor skills explicitly, when you're outside - you don't really need to! 

Of course children are going to need to practise their fine motor skills to develop their strength and dexterity. We've put some ideas together here - click on the picture to open them!

Many of you will possibly already do some kind of focus on motor skills. We use Dough Disco, inspired by Shonette Bason-Wood, over at Spread The Happiness! We love Dough Disco because it is a great way to improve the strength and dexterity of little hands, plus its a chance to have a good dance to whatever music you like! Here's a video - if you've never seen Shonette before, you're in for an experience!

We've also been inspired by Alistair Bryce-Clegg at abcdoes.com to support motor skills development using a display. We have done this by taking photos of the various pencil grips we have seen in the classroom and creating a rough sequence of development. This helps us track their progress and support adults with targeting activities. 

We made an episode of Ace TV all about pencil grip - check it out!

So - what do you think? Do your children have poor pencil grip? Is there an overuse of tablets and touchscreen phones? What do you do to combat this? Let us know!