Mumsnet Talk

Hi, DS is home educated due to various issues including previously undiagnosed (by school) dyspraxia. He is pretty bright, reading age of 9/10 and v good at science and maths. The writing has been a big struggle but since being home edded he is coming along. He still hates it and does little bits and pieces during the day eg puzzles or to annotate his diagrams however he is not really doing larger pieces of writing. Every evening he writes two sentences in his diary (not short ones). I am guessing this is quite behind average. Some pointers would be useful eg length of a piece of writing expected by a reasonably bright child and types of writing. His spelling and punctuation are pretty good by the way. it's just the physical act of writing which is the big issue.

Cheers in advance.

My son is in y1 and average in terms of reading and writing. He would produce a couple of sentences for a diary.

My daughter was an advanced reader in y1 and could produce a page or two in her school notebook (half to 2 thirds of an a4 so a5 ish?) without breaking a sweat.

It varies a lot within the class. There are children who struggle with writing a sentence with full stop, spaces and capital letters and others who can write loads.

The longest thing that my son wrote at home unaided was a list of 10 or so things. Like his older brother at the same age, lists have gone down well.

DD sounds similar to your DS OP in a lot of ways. She would manage a couple of sentences, but often only produces a couple of words.

DS2 in Yr 1 is an advanced reader (is coasting through lime bookband atm), loves language and words generally, and will write a few sentences, but usually has to be dragged kicking and screaming to do them. He can punctuate, space and spell quite well but loathes the mechanics of writing. However, I would say the quality of what your DS is writing is more important than the length. How much do you have to help him to write his sentences, and how far are the ideas/vocab choices his own? That is the important bit imo.

Meant to add that DD's teacher has admitted DD has difficulty writing, and given us permission to let her type or produce work on a big board and photograph it when she's doing homework, just to see if this makes any difference to her ability to express things in writing.

The OP didn't ask about book bands.

In fairness, the op mentioned her sons reading ability and writing not matching so that makes the reading level of other people's dc compared to how they write relevant. It's not a boast if that's what concerns you. Dd is in year one and writes correctly punctuated and spelt sentences. Volume is hard to judge-at home rarely more than two to three sentences. I haven't looked at school books for a while. She reads fluently and with expression fwiw. Not sure of book band or reading age.

The range in DD's Y1 class is from a simple sentence to several pages. I would guess the average is probably 2 or 3 sentences.

Strange enough, DD did bit of writing tonight about some tulips we have in a vase on the dining table, they are pretty pink, she wanted to do it but I had to help, she produced four sentences of a decent standard with nice description and good spellings.
IME she would have probably written more, but it would have been all over the shop, forgetting punctuation, and not descriptive enough.
It does resonate with me, quality over quantity, and couple of sentences I think is reasonable, expecting essays at the age of five or six, tad unreasonable.
Better to concentrate on what is written, rather then how much of it, stamina of writing more will come with age and maturity IMO.

You could find out how many letters per minute your child can copy, then how many can he write from memory per minute (eg the alphabet).That will give you an idea of his maximum writing speed. Toss in spelling and what to write and the speed decreases. From memory the average copying letters rate (per minute) is about 10 for YR, then going up 10 per year.

Cheers everyone.

So Malaleuca - do you mean he should be able to write 20 letters of the alphabet in one minute? I'll set him the challenge and see how he does.

Can I hijack this to ask how much upper/lower case and spaces matter at this stage? Am trying to work on my son's below average writing, and he will do several lines, but several letters always still in upper case. Will it sort itself out?

If I recall (a couple of years since I was Y1 teacher) I'd look for a "top group" y1 to be be using full stops and capital letters consistently and to have all their letters correctly formed and of a consistent size. Common words should have correct spelling and other words should be plausible using phonic knowledge to date. Interesting vocabularly would be included in their work - eg descriptive words and a range of verbs. They would have variety in their sentence openings and be using a small set of connectives. In non fiction work, they would be using topic specific vocabularly and some time connectives.

I think the published guidelines for literacy in KS1 are OTT genre obsessed (they are now archived somewhere). But I think a child should be able to write about something they have done or somewhere they have been in the right order. They should also understand the structure of a story and use it to retell or write their own.

With my reception class, we always use a photo or picture as a starting point so that they have something to talk about first. Then we help them finalise their sentence and then they write it down. This may be the best approach to start with. If your child likes science, maybe that's a good thing to start writing about.

If he is dyspraxic would it be less stressful for him to try typing instead? I am a teacher and SENCo and we start teaching touchtyping skills as soon as a child is ready so that they can use that way of recording and reduce the added stress of the physical act of writing - we do of course still have the children doing pencil and paper writing as well as they do need to continue to develop those skills too.

I was in dd's school for parents evening last week and on display every child had independently (no help with spelling etc) written a page of A4 on slightly wide spaced lines, I have no idea how long they had for this activity though.

The spelling was 'phonetically plausible' but wrong, so things like ovv (of) and wich (witch) stood out and there were some capitals, full stops and exclamation marks but def not in every sentence and some children had none.

I'm also a teacher and a SENCO and I personally would not suggest typing for a 5/6 year old. Keyboard skills are as physically difficult for a young child with dyspraxia as writing far better to work on the difficulty with support from an OT if possible.
I'm not surprised a school hasn't picked up the dyspraxia in reception as young children are still developing so in any class there will be a huge spread of physical ability.