My yr4 DS is really struggling with spelling and writing. He's a reasonably competent reader, although has trouble keeping his place and often skips 'the and, if, but', small words as his eyes seem to flit about on the page. He has no problem reading bigger words, although often can't work out the sounds, like 'oi' makes an 'oy' sound if that makes sense. He seems to need to know the whole word rather than knowing its component parts and working it out, although will attempt to do that if I help him.
Writing is his real bugbear though. An example from his homework last night 'the wortar gets pust up and the sume rock gets dsofd (dissolved) and gets colder and macks mor rock.' He knows what he wants to say and understand quite difficult concepts but just can't express it in words and can't seem to read back what he's written and see what's wrong.
He finds it very difficult to copy accurately, so for 11 spelling words he brought home this week 5 had been copied down from the board wrongly. He will learn them for his test by diligent daily practice but will have forgotten them again a day or 2 later. His teacher gave us a printed list when we told her he's not copying them accurately.
His teacher is well aware of this problem and said last term that she was trying to get to the bottom of what the issue was and come up with strategies to help him. She said she would give him a word mat for topic work etc. He has made progress this year and his handwring has improved, but I'd love to be able to support him more from home if I could because he's finding it frustrating and I'm not sure of the best way to help.
I've seen some great advice on here and would be so grateful if anyone could help.