My 7 year old dd goes to elaborate lengths to avoid writing. At school she does the absolute minimum stopping after two or three words. They do little creative writing at school, mainly grammar exercises, but dd merely copies a few words from the text book. Recently I noticed in her school book that her teacher had had to correct her spelling of her name. Actually she has been able to write her name correctly since she was 3.
I tried today to get us writing a story together. Both kids got quite into making a story up orally and so I suggested we write it down. Dd suddenly wanted to play outside, but I finally managed to get her to sit down with the promise that I would write most of it and we would then have a nice book with the story they had made up. I did manage to get her to write a few sentences and it was noticeable that, apart from a word which she had had in a spelling test a week ago, her spelling was such that the words were unintelligible. I didn´t mention this at all as I wanted her to experience writing for pleasure (although unfortunately it wasn´t because I was coercing her to do it - but she had enjoyed making up the story). Still, she wrote things like "mim" instead of "him" and "parin" instead of "pirate". It is very difficult to "decode" what she wrote.
She used to be very bad at spelling tests but has improved such that she now often gets all words right - we practice every night and the improvement has been dramatic. However, two or three weeks later it is as if the words have been completely erased from her memory.
I wouldn´t worry about it and let her develop at her own pace. However, I am concerned that she dislikes writing so much. I remember writing thousands of little stories at her age and enjoying it immensely. I don´t know, but I fear her difficulty spelling is making her feel inadequate with her writing and this feeling of incompetence is leading her to avoid writing altogether.
How can I help her?