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Summer Travel Tips
More Than Packing a Bag: Preparing for a Smooth Summer Trip with Your Child Summer travel tips start here, because summer is a fantastic time for family adventures! If you have a child with special needs, creating a travel plan might seem daunting at first. But fear...
Middle School and Handwriting: Part 2 of 2
How to Improve Horrendous Handwriting When All Hope Is Lost PART 2 OF MIDDLE SCHOOL & HANDWRITING When I first learned that I was getting hired in the district where I currently work, I was beyond thrilled. A school district job! It's like winning the lottery!...
Middle School and Handwriting: How to Help Your Child Improve Their Legibility After Elementary School – Part 1
Middle School ANd Handwriting—Part 1 of 2 So many parents lose hope for improving their child's handwriting after elementary school. It definitely can seem hopeless at times. How do you change a habit that has been developed over so many years? There's always the old...
Why We Wrote Gripipedia
We wrote the Gripipedia because we felt there should be a MUCH easier and faster way to answer the same questions over and over. We wanted a way to simplify the process of helping children's fine motor skills. And most importantly, we wanted a fast and easy way to...
The Sensory Side of Pencil Grasp: When Touch, Pressure & Proprioception Change Everything
Sensory processing plays a bigger role in pencil grasp development than many of us realize, and sometimes we miss the forest for the trees when we focus only on finger positioning without understanding the sensory foundation that makes functional grasps possible. The...
When Good Grasps Go Bad: Recognizing Fatigue, Pain, and Dysfunction in Young Writers
Last year, I got a panicked email from a second-grade teacher: "I have a student whose pencil grasp looks perfect, just like the poster in my classroom, but she's complaining of hand pain after just five minutes of writing. What am I missing?" This happens more often...
What Is MTSS and Why School OTPs Belong at the Table Before the Referral Hits
I sat in a meeting early in my career — one of those meetings where you're the only occupational therapist in a room full of people who think OT begins and ends with the referral form. A second-grader had been struggling with handwriting since kindergarten. His...
MTSS for School-Based Therapists: A Free Tier-by-Tier Breakdown
There's a shift happening in school-based therapy right now, and if you've been in any room where MTSS came up lately, you've probably felt it too. I got a front-row seat to just how big that shift is when I presented on MTSS at AOTA INSPIRE 2026 in Anaheim. The room...
Do Songs, Posters, and Visual Cues Actually Change How Kids Learn Pencil Grasp? (Yes — and Here’s Why)
A few years ago I was doing a PD session for a group of first-grade teachers and I taught them the "Alligator Chop" — a grasp cue song where children snap their fingers like an alligator's jaws before picking up their pencil (The TV Teacher, 2011). One teacher in the...