Little hands - disadvantage?

[Poddi]

I was wondering if having small hands make doing things more difficult for kids. My 5 year old has horrible writing and drawings and is generally not great with working with his hands. He has very small hands, very slim with pointy fingers, and flexible joints. His brother who's 18 months older has big, solid meaty hands with about 3X the mass. He's great with his hands and can do all sorts of tricky stuff and seems to have a lot of muscular strength. I know it's probably their individual differences and there isn't much we can do about it. Just wondering if there's anyway for us to help my boy with tiny soft hands to improve using his hands?

[AAK]

I am married to an OT. When he was doing various fieldworks for school, one of them was at a public school. It seemed that they were constantly working on helping kids with handwriting or other fine motor skills.

Some things they did: Helped muscle strength through activities such as hiding beads or other treasures in thera putty (basically, clay that wasn't soft (not play doh))--the kids would use their fingers to push the clay around and find the objects. Sometimes they would have the kids use the pencil grips to help with muscle fatigue. Sometimes they would have kids write on a slant.

Amy