Six quiet tools that come before letters, in the order they sit on the page. Each one answers the same five questions: what the child does, what the tool does back, how it grows, what the gold moment is, and what it never does. The one law running through all of them: the tool seeks the child.
No score, no timer, no failure state. A stray finger cools a glow or lets a light wait. Nothing breaks, nothing counts down, nothing is lost.
Gold means one thing. Completion. Every other response is green, the app's one accent, or the warm off-white ink. The gold chime is the same bounce-up the letter tools use, so finishing sounds identical everywhere in Fair Hand.
Sound is off until a grown-up turns it on. The speaker pill switches on a small palette of plucked notes in a soft hall: a shimmer for closeness, a felt drop for a landing, do to mi for a bloom, a deep breathing tone for rest.
Two grounds. Dark is night: closeness literally glows. Light is day: glows become soft green washes on oat paper. The sun pill swaps them.
Again, when it is over. Five seconds after a gold moment the page offers a fresh start, as a growing pill in the row and a larger one in the field. Nothing restarts on its own.
The row as it appears on the page. Tap a pill here to jump to its entry.
Visual motor integration
The nine forms before letters, shown once and then copied from memory in the open.
Watches a form draw itself large in the field, then makes it anywhere, at any size, with a finger. A standing line, a lying line, a circle, a cross, a slope one way, a square, a slope the other way, an X, a triangle: the order occupational therapists teach them and the order they are assessed in.
Draws the model with a light at the pen, stroke by stroke, so a lift reads as a lift. A tap skips the showing. Then the model settles up to the top as a small key and leaves the field empty: this is copying, not tracing. When the finger lifts, the tool lays the form over the drawing at the drawing's own size and asks two generous questions: is most of the form near some ink, and is most of the ink near the form. An oval is a circle and a wobbly line is a line, but a square is not a circle and the wrong slope is not the right one.
A good copy turns green, blooms small petals along the child's own line, joins a row of tiny outlines along the bottom, and the next form arrives. A copy that has not landed fades quietly 2.4 seconds after the last lift. Two of those, and a faint dashed ghost of the form appears in the field to draw over: the patient help, never the answer given first.
Nine copies. The row along the bottom turns gold and the nine forms ring the key in gold, with a glow behind it.
Counts strokes, marks a miss, or times the copy. A cross made in one motion is a cross. A dot is not a copy yet, so nothing happens until there is a drawing to read.
Smooth pursuit, hand and eye together
A light drifts over a dark meadow, and staying with it is what makes the meadow grow.
Follows the light with a finger. A slow, continuous movement, the kind that cannot be done with a fling.
Wanders at an eased walking pace, about 55 pixels a second. When the finger drifts away, the firefly comes looking for it, and parks a little above the fingertip so the hand never hides it. A thread of light joins fly to finger while they are together. A wandering finger on its own lights nothing: the reward is gated on closeness over time, not on presence.
Staying close sheds seeds of light. The seeds drift down to the grass and the blades bloom one by one. The lit meadow draws more fireflies. Stay close a long while and the firefly settles on a blade for a shared rest at breathing pace, and a resting firefly warms its own blade alight.
When every blade has bloomed, a single gold flower opens.
Runs away, or ends a lapse with a wall. Losing the light costs nothing and the thread is offered back, so the lapse never becomes the end of practice.
Crossing the midline
A soft light circles a big figure eight at breathing pace, and the child travels with it.
Keeps a finger with the light around the whole loop, crossing the centre of the body twice a lap.
Moves the light around the eight at a calm circuit of about 9 seconds. If the finger falls behind, the light slows to under half pace and waits. It never runs ahead. A warm third of sound swells lobe by lobe when the speaker is on.
Each well-followed lap grows one leaf on the stem in the corner. The leaf itself is silent: the breath tone already carries the tool, the leaf is its quiet ledger.
Twelve leaves become a flower.
Claims anything about the brain. The exercise is a standard one, and the claim here is motor: a written line is one long midline journey, and the eight is its distilled form.
Inhibition, going slowly on purpose
A small snail sets out toward a closed bud, and only walks while a finger keeps it gentle company.
Keeps a finger near the snail and moves at its pace. Slower than they want to.
Walks at about 14 pixels a second while a finger is within reach. Rush ahead by more than 90 pixels and it tucks shyly into its shell and stops. Come back, and it peeks out and carries on. Hurrying delays, patience travels. Its shell is a spiral of lights that kindle with the journey's actual progress, so it carries its own story on its back.
Grass sprouts wherever it has passed. Alone, it simply waits.
Arriving together opens the bud in gold.
Punishes the rush. Tucking is a pause, not a loss. Nothing is undone by hurrying, only postponed.
Bilateral coordination, two hands together
One wing for each thumb; moving them together, mirrored, lifts the butterfly up the garden.
Holds the phone in both hands and moves both thumbs up and down together.
Reads the two touches. When they move as mirrors of each other the butterfly climbs; when one thumb leads the other it tilts and drifts gently down toward rest. Never a fall. One thumb on its own still lifts it, gently, at a third of the strength.
Flowers open on the vine at each quarter of the climb.
The bud at the top opens gold on arrival.
Drops the butterfly to the ground, or asks for a movement a single hand cannot make at all.
Rhythm and timing, meeting the moment
Slow drops fall toward a pool, and a tap that meets one as it lands rings a note.
Watches a drop fall and taps it as it reaches the water.
Lets one drop go every 2.4 seconds, somewhere across the middle of the sky. A tap within a hand's reach of a drop near the pool line meets it: it rings an ascending note on a pentatonic scale, the sound palette as the mechanic itself. A missed drop just plips and lands.
Each met drop rings one step higher and adds a ripple of warmth to the pool.
Twelve met drops open a gold lily on the water.
Speeds up, or counts the misses. Timing work of this kind is an established intervention, and the rain keeps it at one calm tempo.
A finger on glass cannot train pencil grasp, pressure control or hand strength. These tools work the layer underneath: control, crossing, pursuit, timing, and the copying of forms. They support practice between sessions and replace nothing. Whether screen practice reaches paper is a genuinely open question in the research, and the app says so plainly.
The numbers on this page are the tuning as built, in pixels and seconds, and they are the things a therapist's testing may move.
Fair Hand, the warm-up (unlisted, not yet linked from inside the app). Built in Fair Hand task 0108, motor foundations; the shapes added in task 0115, pre-writing shapes. Everything runs on the device and nothing is tracked. Written 4 September 2026.