Ds, yr 5 is doing well in maths and science, in group 2 of 5 in each. His teacher is happy with him BUT he's in group 4 out of 5 for Literacy. The main reasons are:
Short, though improving attention span, and basically, an inability to think around a subject in order to put SOMETHING down on paper!
The teacher said DS1 is hard to assess as he just doesn't get enough work down, but the issue seems to be DS doesn't actually HAVE any ideas to commit to paper! Not that he's having trouble mentally organising a mass of thoughts into coherent sentences which would be a different issue altogether!
DS, not completely unreasonably, does ask why one NEEDS a 'good' imagination!
Does he?
To be honest DH has the imagination of tarmac and is a man who never lies in bed awake at night worrying about the 'what if's' of life becasue they just don't occur to him- not necessarily a bad way to go through life, really, so it's no surprise that DS follows suit BUT Modern Education does seem to value having a vivid imagination. I see DS as eventually going into IT or engineering, neither career path exactly studded with the world's great story tellers BUT is DS going to get into the higher ed. needed to qualify WITHOUT a decent literacy/English score?
His reading level is average to a bit above but it has been the devil's own job to encourage reading- he practically never picks up a book of his own volition, but he does like spy books.
I've been setting him daily writing tasks (which he hates) in an effort to improve the amount and quality of what he writes but I feel a bit out of my depth- AM I focusing on the right things? Is it specific tasks he's not good at (eg 'write 3 sentences using appropriate speech marks') or should it be 'just write about subject 'x''? What I do is tell him to think about the subject I'm about to name, does he like it? Or not? Why? Is it hard? Easy? OK? Then I give him a timed minute without pen or paper to THINK about what he'll write, I then say 'Karate' or "Pokemon"- then off he goes. I don't time this bit in that there is no time limit because it'd be hard to monitor 'improvement' as each sentence is different and I don't want the dashing ANYTHING off just to get through it in time.
The results have been very patchy. I'll leave him to it and 5 minutes later he'll say he's finished and there will be 12 words. I'm SURE that if I asked him to write a bullet pointed list, he'd be FAR better! I think he knows how to write English- I mean, I feel that he would pass an old style English Language O level in that his analytical mind can get itself around 'this is a verb/ adverb/ clause' but he doesn't seem able to take a topic and DO anything with it!
And yes, I use bribery!
AM I wasting my time?
HOW important is the ability to use one's imagination to come up with interesting ideas or a different slant on a topic?
DO I accept that this skill ISN'T paramount to a possible future engineer BUT will DS be able to pursue such a career without it?