The Guide You Always Wanted
A Guide to Pencil Grips and Grasps
Digital and/or Spiral Bound Hard Copy
With evidence-based strategies to make the most impact on the kids in your life!
151 pages from two pediatric OTs who spent nine years figuring this out so you don’t have to. Half research and clinical decision-making. Half printable resources you’ll use every week.
BUY THE eBOOK
$49 USD regularly — $39 USD on sale
BUT THE PRINTED VERSION
$69 USD regularly — $59 USD on sale
Gripipedia — Print Edition (Coil Bound) + Digital
Gripipedia: A Guide to Pencil Grips and Grasps — Digital Edition (PDF)
Original price was: $69.00.$59.00Current price is: $59.00.
Original price was: $49.00.$39.00Current price is: $39.00.
Hard Copy, Printed Book. Coil Bound. Delivery time is up to 10 Business Days.
The full-color, coil-bound Gripipedia — printed to lay completely flat so handouts photocopy cleanly. Includes the complete digital edition at no extra cost.
Same content as the digital version.
151 pages from two pediatric OTs with nine years of work behind it. The first half teaches you what’s actually going on with grips and grasps — the research, the anatomy, the decision-making. The second half is 42 printable resource pages you can copy for the rest of your career: 18 grip-by-grip handouts, evaluation forms, visual cues, reward charts, and a class record sheet so you finally know which kid has which grip.
Picking the right grip is tricky. Getting it used correctly is the hard part. This book handles both.
Instant download. Print the resource pages as many times as you want.
Formats and pricing
Digital edition — $49.00 Regular Price, but $39.00 USD for a Limited Time. The complete 151-page book as a PDF. Print the resource pages as many times as you want, on your school copier, for the length of your career. This is the format most people want, and it’s the one we recommend.
Printed, Coil-bound, Hard Copy — $79.00 USD, but $69.00 USD for a Limited Time. A spiral-bound, lay-flat print copy plus the full PDF. The spiral binding is deliberate — this book is meant to be opened flat on a copier, not wrestled with.
One honest note about print: we chose premium color so the grip photos are actually usable, and printing at this quality costs what it costs. The print edition is priced to cover it, not to make money. If budget is your deciding factor, buy 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
Jaime Spencer, MS, OTR/L
MissJaimeOT.com – United States
Jaime. from Miss Jaime. OT, has a Bachelor’s degree in occupational therapy from Utica College and a Master’s Degree in Special Education from Adelphi University. Miss Jaime. O.T., P.C. is an approved provider of continuing education from the American Occupational Therapy Association. She has been a Long Island pediatric OT for twenty-five years and currently works in a public school setting with students Kindergarten to 12th grade. Jaime is a passionate advocate for occupational therapists. speaking nationally on the topic of parity for school-based practitioners. She is the administrator of the grassroots advocacy coalition “USA School-based OTPs Looking for Change”.
Cindy Chuan, OT
YourKidsOT.com – 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.
1: The Problem
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 and 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 she was supposed to be looking 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 any of that sounds familiar, this book was built for you.
2: What we actually made
Cindy Chuan and I have both been doing this a long time, on two different continents, and we kept running into the same set of 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 how to pick a grip without a 40-minute in-service
- Motivating a child to actually use their grip — correctly, and without you 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.
3: The first half — the clinical content
This is the part that makes you the person in the building who actually knows what they’re talking about. Fifteen chapters across four sections.
Section 1: Pencil Grasp Fundamentals
- What the research actually says — including the part most people get wrong. There are four equally mature and functional grasps, not one. Dynamic tripod, dynamic quadrupod, lateral tripod, lateral quadrupod. The dynamic tripod stopped being the gold standard a while ago.
- The “grasp doesn’t affect legibility” problem. You’ve heard someone say it in a meeting. What almost nobody mentions is that most of those studies only included children who already had mature grasps — kids with immature or inefficient patterns were excluded from the sample. We walk through the studies, the sample sizes, and the limitations so you can answer that comment with something better than a feeling.
- Promoting efficient grasp within MTSS — with a full tiered framework laid out for you. Tier 1 universal strategies, Tier 2 targeted group work, Tier 3 intensive. If you’re trying to get into general ed under ESSA, this chapter is your argument.
- The development of pencil grasp — early immature, transitional, mature, with photographs.
- Anatomy of the hand — bones, joints, muscles, arches, web spaces, sensory considerations.
- Joint laxity and adaptive grasps — the kids whose grasp looks wrong but is doing exactly what their hands need it to do.
- The fine motor skills underneath grasp — forearm stability, web space, palmar arches, separation of the two sides of the hand, in-hand manipulation, intrinsic movement, strength. Plus activities for each.
Section 2: Evaluation of Pencil Grasp
- A pencil grasp evaluation form, plus written description examples so your report language is precise instead of “immature grasp noted.”
- The Gripipedia Pencil Grasp Decision Guide — clinical decision-making laid out step by step. Should this grasp be changed? What do you do instead if it shouldn’t?
- Clear definitions of functional, efficient, dynamic, static, tripod, quadrupod, lateral, adaptive — so you and the teacher are using the same words.
- A straight answer on when to change an inefficient grasp (age, pain, fatigue, quantity, speed, hooking, hand-switching, pressure) and when to leave it alone and move to AT.
- Case studies.
Section 3: Teaching Pencil Grasp
- Teaching according to age — what to do with a 3-year-old is not what to do with a 9-year-old.
- Vertical surfaces and alternative positioning — and why they work.
- Tips and tricks for a dynamic grasp — finger positioning, writing and non-writing tools, visual and auditory cues, and the small-crayon-versus-jumbo-crayon question (the research isn’t on the side of jumbo).
- Accommodation and remediation — adapted tripod grasp, pencil grips, splinting and casting, slant boards, the TIP Grip Protocol, adaptive pencils and pens.
Section 4: Pencil Grasp and Handwriting
- Posture, positioning, and readiness.
- Pencil pressure — why it happens, what to do about it, with case studies.
- Left-handed writers. An actual chapter, not a footnote.
Plus a full FAQ section
The questions you get asked constantly, answered in language you can read out loud to a parent. Is it ever too late? My writing is neat with the “wrong” grasp, so why bother with my kid’s? Are grips worth it if they keep getting lost? Is grasp hereditary? Does crayon diameter really matter? Written so you can hand it over instead of explaining it for the four hundredth time.
4: The second half — the resource pages
This is the part we’re proudest of, and it’s the part that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
42 pages, designed to be printed and copied for as long as you’re practicing. Permission is granted right in the book to copy them for use with your students, their families, and your colleagues. Keep the Gripipedia name on them and they’re yours to use.
18 “Let’s Try a Pencil Grip” one-pagers — one for each grip and tool, with the actual product pictured, finger-by-finger positioning instructions, righty and lefty guidance, a plain-language “why grasp matters” and “how you can help” section for the adult, spaces for the student name and your name and email, and a built-in reward chart at the bottom.
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:
| For the classroom | For the child | For you |
| Pencil Grip Rules poster | I’m Holding My Pencil Correctly reward page | Pencil Grasp Evaluation Form |
| Righty and Lefty visual prompts | 4 pencil grip reward charts | Class Pencil Grip Record* |
| Why Small Crayons and Pencils Are Better | A-OK and Tuck It Away | Developmental Progression charts — right and left hand |
| How to Size a Desk | Pinch and Flip | Check Your Grasp! |
| All About Slant Boards | Pencil Face | Developing Hand Strength |
| I’m Ready to Write | Pencil Warm Ups! | TIP Grip Protocol |
* A note on the Class Pencil Grip Record, because it’s the one people don’t expect to love: it’s a single sheet with every grip pictured, so a teacher can check off which student has which one. No more “the blue squishy one, I think?” Hand it to the classroom teacher in September and you’ll both know where things stand in June.
5: Who this is for
- School-based OTs and COTAs who want the research nailed down and the handouts already made
- Clinic-based pediatric OTs who need parents to follow through between sessions
- Teachers and special educators who’ve been told grasp matters but never told what to look for
- OT students and new grads who want one book instead of nine tabs and a Facebook group
- Anyone running a district-level handwriting or MTSS initiative
If you supervise or mentor, this is also the thing you hand a new therapist so you don’t have to explain grip selection from scratch every fall.
6: Why we wrote it this way
Handwriting instruction has been squeezed out of the school day while the expectations have gone up. Kids are handed pencils at three and four, before their hands are ready, and the grasp habits they build to compensate get locked in early — often by the end of kindergarten, in what we’ve both observed.
We think readiness skills belong back in the conversation. And we think the fastest way to get there isn’t another article. It’s putting a good handout in the hands of the adult who’s with that child all day.
We did the research part. We wrote the handouts. You get your Sunday night back.