Formats and pricing

Print Edition (Coil-Bound) + Digital

$69 $59 USD for a limited time

• A full-color, spiral-bound copy that lays flat on a copier
• Includes the complete digital edition at no extra cost
• Ships within up to 10 business days

An honest note about print: we chose premium color so the grip photos are usable, and printing at that quality costs what it costs. The print edition is priced to cover that cost, not to make money. If budget matters, get the digital edition. It’s the same book, and you can print the pages you need.

Purchasing for a district or a department? Contact us about bulk copies. Help@MissJaimeOT.com

About the authors

Cindy Chuan, OT

YourKidsOT.com, Sydney, Australia

Cindy, from Your Kids OT, has a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Science (occupational therapy) from the University of Sydney. Cindy has worked as an occupational therapist in both the public sector (disability and community health) and private sectors over for 26 years. She now runs her own private practice in Sydney, Australia. Cindy loves finding ways to make learning fun and encouraging a child’s development in their natural environments.
Cindy is passionate about supporting and training occupational therapists with knowledge translation.
She also enjoys her own occupations of walking her dog, playing board games with her own children, crocheting and reading.

Nine years, two hemispheres, a lot of 4:20 a.m. video calls, and a truly unreasonable number of photographs of their own children’s hands.

Illustrations by Waed Haddad. Design by Francis Loh. With thanks to Jan McClesky for the TIP Grip Protocol.

You already know how this goes.

You find a grip that finally works for a kid. You show them how to use it. They nail it in your session.

Then Thursday comes. The grip is in the bottom of a desk, the child is back to a thumb wrap, and the teacher didn’t notice, because nobody ever told her what to look for.

Meanwhile, you’re keeping track of eleven students with six different grips in your head, because there’s no good place to write it down.

If that sounds familiar, this book was built for you.

What we made, and why

Jaime and Cindy have both been doing this a long time, on two different continents. We kept running into the same headaches:

• Helping a stubborn child change a grasp pattern they’ve had since preschool
• Getting a teacher to pay attention to grasp in the first place
• Getting carryover into the classroom when you’re only there once a week
• Convincing parents to follow through at home
• Keeping track of which kid has which grip
• Teaching parents and teachers to pick a grip without a 40-minute in-service
• Motivating a child to use their grip correctly when you’re not standing there

Picking the right grip is tricky. Getting it used consistently and correctly is the hard part. So we wrote the book around both problems.

The first half teaches you the why. The second half is what you hand to everybody else.

The first half: clinical content

This is the part that makes you the person in the building who knows what they’re talking about. It has fifteen chapters across four sections.

Section 1: Pencil Grasp Fundamentals

• What the research says. There are four equally mature, functional grasps, not one. The dynamic tripod stopped being the gold standard a while ago.
• The “grasp doesn’t affect legibility” problem. Most of those studies only included children who already had mature grasps. We walk through the samples and their limitations, so you can answer that comment in a meeting with something better than a feeling.
• Efficient grasp within MTSS, with a full Tier 1, 2, and 3 framework. If you’re working your way into general ed under ESSA, this chapter is your argument.
• Development of pencil grasp, with photographs, plus hand anatomy, joint laxity and adaptive grasps, and the fine motor skills underneath grasp, with activities for each.

Section 2: Evaluation of Pencil Grasp

• A pencil grasp evaluation form, plus written description examples, so your reports say more than “immature grasp noted”
• The Gripipedia Pencil Grasp Decision Guide, which lays out step by step whether a grasp should be changed and what to do if it shouldn’t
• Shared definitions (functional, efficient, dynamic, static, tripod, quadrupod, lateral, adaptive), so you and the teacher are using the same words
• When to change an inefficient grasp, when to leave it alone and move to AT, and case studies

Section 3: Teaching Pencil Grasp

• Teaching by age, because a 3-year-old and a 9-year-old need different things
• Vertical surfaces and alternative positioning
• Finger positioning, cues, and the small-versus-jumbo crayon question (the research isn’t on jumbo’s side)
• Accommodation and remediation: adapted tripod, grips, splinting and casting, slant boards, the TIP Grip Protocol, and adaptive pencils

Section 4: Pencil Grasp and Handwriting

• Posture, positioning, and readiness
• Pencil pressure, with case studies
• Left-handed writers, with a full chapter instead of a footnote

Plus a parent-friendly FAQ. Is it ever too late? My writing is neat with the “wrong” grasp, so why bother? Are grips worth it if they keep getting lost? Is grasp hereditary? The answers are written so you can hand them over instead of explaining for the four hundredth time.

The second half: 42 resource pages

This is the part we’re proudest of, and it doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Every page is designed to be printed and copied for as long as you practice. Permission is granted right in the book to copy them for your students, their families, and your colleagues. Just keep the Gripipedia name on them.

18 “Let’s Try a Pencil Grip” one-pagers

Each one-pager covers one grip or tool. It shows the actual product and gives finger-by-finger positioning for righties and lefties. It includes a plain-language “why grasp matters” and “how you can help” section for the adult, spaces for the student’s name and your contact info, and a built-in reward chart.

Stetro · Grotto · Crossover · Pinch · The Pencil Grip · Jumbo · Writing C.L.A.W. · Egg · Butterfly · Ring · Monkey Tail · Pointer · Triangle · TIP Grip Protocol · Twist & Write · Handiwriter · Weighted Pencil · Handwriting Glove

Send one home. Tape one to a desk. Give one to a sub. Done.

And the rest of it

Learn more about Grips & Grasps from these posts

Watch the Replay