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go-to hand for any task requiring coordination and control.
    If you are unsure as to whether your child has a preferred hand, observe your child eating. Without any prompting on your part, just check out which hand he or she uses to pick up food, both with and without an eating utensil. If your child favors one hand when feeding himself or herself, chances are your child has developed a preference.
    Next, watch which hand your child is inclined to use when coloring. If your child sticks with the same hand that he or she chooses to eat with, that’s good news. If your child switches back and forth between hands when coloring, he or she may not yet have a clear picture of who’s the boss.
    Activities such as throwing and catching a ball or cutting with scissors are not ideal for assessing handedness in young children. Kids occasionally approach these tasks with their nondominant hand, which is typically the more powerful hand, at first, switching to their dominant hand, which is more skillful, later on, when the tasks demand better aim or more precise control.
    If children seem unclear as to which hand to choose, it is important that we don’t do the choosing for them. What we can do, however, is give them plenty of opportunities to engage in bilateral activities that require them to figure out which hand is better at what tasks. Tasks such as mixing batter with one hand (while holding the mixing bowl with the other), spreading butter with a butter knife (while holding the bread steady), or pouring water from a small pitcher (while stabilizing the cup) give children a chance to decide how each hand functions best.
    Get a Grip
     
    Some grasps work (and some really, really don’t). The rule of thumb is: don’t write until it’s right!
    When I look at how children hold their pencils, I see grasps that fall into three basic categories: immature, efficient, and inefficient.
    The grasp that very young children use the first time they pick up a writing tool is usually a power grasp . They grab a crayon in a fisted hand, with thumb up and the rest of their fingers wrapped tightly around the shaft of the crayon. All the little muscles in their hands work together to squeeze the crayon in place so that it doesn’t move. To make marks, they move their entire arm as a unit, dragging the immobilized crayon back and forth across the page. (Often their other arm, legs, hips, and even their tongue move in unison, going along for the ride.) This difficulty dissociating movements of the hand from movements of the rest of the body is exhausting. No wonder their attention span for this exciting new work is fleeting, at best.
    In an attempt to gain more control, most young children soon transition to a pronated grasp . With this grasp, all five fingers are still wrapped around the crayon, but now the thumb and fingertips are pointed down toward the paper. Like the power grasp, everything is locked tightly into place. Again, the whole arm has to move in its entirety in order to get the job done.
    As they grow more comfortable holding a writing tool, children may experiment with other transitional grasps, such as a static quadrupod (four-fingered) grasp or a static tripod (three-fingered) grasp. These grasps are referred to as “static” because the fingers still hold very tightly, often high on the shaft of the writing tool, and the whole hand continues to move as one stiff unit.
    As children’s skills develop and mature, they are better able to isolate out small movements of their hands while stabilizing their wrist, forearm, and upper arm at the shoulder. They are also able to move one side of the hand separately from the other, giving each side of the hand its own function. The thumb side of the hand becomes the skill side, with the first three fingers holding the writing tool like a tripod. The pinky side of the hand becomes the power side, with the fourth and fifth fingers curling into the palm. This side stabilizes the hand on the