YR2 being made to re-do work - handwriting

[MotherofPirates]

DS is in YR2 and doing fine in everything except handwriting which is still pretty poor. He can produce decent writing when doing handwriting practice but when he is writing stories etc. he gets carried away and his work is really difficult to read.

The school is dealing with this by making him rub out all his work - sometimes a couple of pages of text - and re-writing it all. I can see that he needs to produce legible work but this seems to be a pretty brutal and demoralising way of dealing with it.

I know it's not uncommon for children (and boys in particular) to struggle with handwriting and wondered how others in this situation had dealt with it or how teachers had dealt with it in a more encouraging way?

[caravanista13]

That sounds awful! As a teacher I would ask him to choose one sentence to copy out in 'best' after the work is finished

[MotherofPirates]

Thanks caravanista13 that sounds a lot more reasonable. He's getting pretty down about it all.

[teeththief]

I'm not a teacher but used to be a TA. I had a child in a class who was like your son. Lovely handwriting when concentrating but would get carried away when he wasn't concentrating and his writing became unreadable. I ended up photocopying a perfect piece of handwriting he'd done, laminated it and taped it to his table space (we did it for a few children so he wasn't singled out). Then, every time he produced a neater piece of writing, I replaced the old one with the new one. He loved seeing his handwriting improving and it really did help remind him how nice his handwriting could be if he put the effort in.

As for rubbing out pages of work, how demoralising??

[MotherofPirates]

Love that idea teeththief! He does have a lovely TA who might be up for something similar. I guess I just need to explain to the teacher that the current "technique" is getting him down and perhaps we could try something a little more positive. There seems to be a lot of stick and very little carrot this year!

[NurNochKurzDieWeltRetten]

We live abroad and that's standard practice at our school (though not in all schools; we're a rural school with very set in their ways older teachers who seem to be left pretty much to get on with it as long as children emerge at the expected standard at the end). Right from 3 months into school DS1 was having to redo huge amounts of work as extra hhomework due to handwriting and spelling errors ...

His hand writing is now probably better than 80% + of his UK male peers I'd bet (ex teacher) but he hates school...

I'm amazed that is being used as a technique in a UK state school (is it state?) - I thought it was all warm and fluffy, in the infants at least!

[MotherofPirates]

It is a UK state school yes NurNochKurzDieWeltRetten and not in the least fluffy!

[MrsHathaway]

Gosh, I think there's a big difference between asking a child to rewrite something, and actively rubbing it all out It completely devalues the content of the work as well as its appearance.

I have a 6yo Y2 with pretty good writing, but no imagination. He writes very neat boring work. May I be permitted a little face at the idea of "when he is writing stories he gets carried away"? How glorious!

[MotherofPirates]

Thank you MrsHathaway for making me smile! I do sometimes feel schools's doing their best to crush the free spirit in the interests of better box ticking!

[mrz]

I can't see the point of rubbing out the previous work (writing over the top of rubbings out always look scruffy IMHO).
I would expect him to redo the work (not simply copying his poor work) .to the expected standard

[zen1]

I have a DS in Y4 who has terrible trouble with handwriting (been on SN register since Y1 for poor fine motor skills and has been under OTs etc). Yet his current teacher constantly gets him to rub out work "as Ofsted expect neat writing". His hand shakes when he tries to write and control a pencil. He is utterly demoralised and feels a failure. His Y3 teacher, OTOH, couldn't have been more helpful. Got him a sloped writing board and triangular pencils to help his grip. Also used to scribe for him from time to time so the pressure was taken off and we could actually see what he was capable of.