Writing - DS age 6, yr 2 HATES IT! please advise

[clottedcream]

oh dear really struggling with DS, confident reader, enjoys books, has a great imagination and can talk about anything confidentally but hates writing.

Got it out of him today when he was refusing to go to school that

• hates having to sit and finds it difficult to concentrate
• gets frustrated with himself if he has to cross things out and re-write
• Just doesnt enjoy it liek he does reading

Please help me encourage a love of writing or at least not get so frustrated with himself, dont want my boy to feel sad and not want to go to school :(

Talk to the teacher? Seems a shame for a 6 year old to feel so negative. If they're any good they should have a plan to help.

Sounds like my ds. What I do is pick out what his I interests are so for example he likes spiderman. Then I will say tell me a story about spiderman and his rescues. Which then he waffle on. Then I'll be all excited and say leta write that down and guide him and try and make him think of great words. I've only started past week but he still says oh I hate this but gets in to it when I give him appraisal. Hope this helps :)

I'm not sure how helpful this will be but the one thing that really helped my DS (7) to start enjoying writing more was to focus on things that he was really passionate about.

For example, he loves Star Wars lego and so after he'd built a particular figure or vehicle or whatever I'd take a quick photo of it, he'd paste it into his writing book, and then he'd write a bit about what it could do, its powers and enemies, etc.

The tricky thing is that we were able to do this as we home ed so I'm trying to think how you could apply this to the school situation. I suppose many writing assignments at school are pretty open ended and maybe you could encourage him to see a writing assignment at school as an opportunity to write (which you could explain is just another way of talking really) about stuff he's really interested in.

Other things that have worked are cool pens. Someone gave my DS a spy pen which he'd write secret messages with and then shine a light at the end of the pen, to reveal the writing.

It's tricky - boys and writing - seems to be a common issue! I think the key thing is that the writing task has to seem meaningful/useful to them. My DS has been very enthusiastically writing a long Christmas wish list - clearly he feels this is a meaningful task!

My 6 y.o Y2 boy was exactly the same until really very recently. It didn't help that he struggled very much with the fine motor skills and coordination he needed for writing, so it was a nightmare.

Things that helped him were:

• we got him a whiteboard type thing (actually my dad made it out of wipe-clean laminated MDF-stuff, which he made into a drawing board pitched at the optimum angle to help with writing). Anyway, I'm not convinced that the angle of it really made any difference, but he loved that he could write, and if he made mistakes, a quick zap with a cloth and it was gone. He really seemed to gain confidence from this, and my 5 year old DS2 is another big fan of the whiteboard for the same reason.

• giving him a reason to write. I abandoned any efforts to get him to sit down and write anything. I'd do things like rummage in cupboards when I was getting ready to go shopping, and then say 'DS1, if I tell you what snack things we need for your lunchbox next week, can you make me a quick list?'

Gradually, he's got better about it and now he will write for pleasure, but it's been a really long time coming.

thank you for your advice. Yes he does like drawing Star Wars ships and labelling them and doing headings. Ive also got a blackboard noticeboard in kitchen so will get him to chalk his snacks on there and the magic pen is a fab idea - thank you :)

clotted, getting them to write the shopping list helps too - especially if they can list a treat.

Not sure if this is of interest or not, but my DS's school have a policy on writing, which I was a bit sceptical about, but I can see the logic now. They encourage children to write with a flow, so not to worry too much about spelling at first. They concentrate on letter formation (cursive from Yr1) and writing creatively and are only now nailing down on spellings with him (he's in Yr3). The teachers explained that if you're too hard on correcting early on it can put them off and they'd rather foster a love of writing, then once that's secure gradually improve the rest. It does seem to work, or has for us. He writes all the time. I have had to sit on my hands sometimes to stop myself pointing out mistakes, but slowly that's less and less.