Hand exercises

Do you find your hand aches after you have been writing for 5 to 10 minutes? Do you find that your grip on your pen or pencil gets looser as write and then becomes harder to control? 

This could be because you are gripping your pen or pencil too hard as you focus on forming your letters. As you do this, you will normally find that you press harder and harder on the paper. Remember, you shouldn't be able to feel each letter if you turned your page over and traced your fingers over it. 

It could also be that you need to make your hands stronger. If you have found writing hard when you were younger, you may not have built up the stamina in hand to write for a longer period of time. Think about running - you can run further and faster now than when you were in your infant school. This is because you have practised and it has built up your speed and stamina. It is the same for writing. 

Here are some links and resources to build your hand strength and stamina. 

 - a handwriting warm up routine with a variety of exercises. 

Teach Handwriting have a lot of short videos with one exercise in each and explains how the exercise should work. Here are a couple: 

 - the pencil flip for whole hand strength and flexibility

 - a thumb stretch


Try warming up your hands before doing your handwriting practice or a longer writing session. 

 

C Shapes

We are going to begin with the basic c shape and look at all the letters that use it. 

The order for the letter in this first sequence is c, a, d, g, o and q. 


Before starting any of the videos, warm up your hands using the warm up in the post above and make sure you have your handwriting paper and a sharp pencil with you.