Improving child's literacy skills

[Iamseeingstars]

I need your input.

Have a "bright capable but lazy" child who makes no effort whatsover in her writing skills. She is Year 7 but - in my opinion - a Year 4 child produce better work. I know that she has been taught about sentence structure, punctuation, verbs, nouns and everything else, but she chooses to ignore it all and writes a lot of disjointed rubbish. Nothing flows, beginning, middle and endings dont exist.

We have spoken to the teacher on previous occasions who has said she will monitor her work, but nothing is marked or corrected (looking at her school books) , so she doesnt see the point of doing anything.

We are wondering about tutors or online programmes to try and sort out these issues once and for all and would appreciate your feedback.

Does she have neat writing? Is writing physically hard in some way?
Could it be she has a vision problem?

My DS (nearly 8) was really really struggling with writing, but great at everything else. it turned out he had a serious eye tracking problem that a regular high street optician had missed 3 times. A behaviour optometrist spotted it immediately and it has been cured with Vision Therapy.

Just a thought?

Eyesight has been tested by different opticians and no problems found.

Handwriting can be neat, but can also be very scruffy. Punctuation and capital usage non existent.

I think my issue is the teacher doesn't correct her work so she thinks its good enough. She is not on the radar for any attention and I feel does get ignored in the class.

I can't contribute anything constructive to this, but my dd(Y8) is pretty much the same in some respects- no capitals, random punctuation. I honestly believe that some of this is down to the attitude of her primary school, who seemed to believe that correcting her work would interrupt the flow and somehow put her off writing. Now she just seems to view it as a personal style,a bit like not joining up her writing.

I shall follow this thread with interest.

^Have a "bright capable but lazy" child who makes no effort whatsover in her writing skills. She is Year 7 but - in my opinion - a Year 4 child produce better work. I know that she has been taught about sentence structure, punctuation, verbs, nouns and everything else, but she chooses to ignore it all and writes a lot of disjointed rubbish. Nothing flows, beginning, middle and endings dont exist.

We have spoken to the teacher on previous occasions who has said she will monitor her work, but nothing is marked or corrected (looking at her school books) , so she doesnt see the point of doing anything.

We are wondering about tutors or online programmes to try and sort out these issues once and for all and would appreciate your feedback.^

Being taught the theory - like writing by numbers - does not necessarily translate into competent writing. Do you think she is just lazy, or do you think your DD has a real difficulty with this? Can she read back her work and see where she has gone wrong, or does it all make perfect sense to her? I don't think just correcting work in an exercise book is of much help except where there are simply a few careless errors. If the writing is as poor as you are suggesting, it sounds as if she needs someone to go through her work with her - not really possible for a teacher in an average sized class. I doubt if any on-line programmes are sophisticated enough to really help, though she might like to take a look at www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise. However, it could be more of what she has already been taught which is not working through to her own writing. I feel a tutor would be of much more help as they could work on your DD's writing one-to-one. Your DD would, however, have to be motivated to get the benefit.

have you tried bribery and corruption?