Can a primary teacher come and talk to me about my yr2 daughter please

[whostolemycamel]

We're overseas and she's at a British Curriculum school. I'm coming to a bit of a sticking point with her teacher and I don't quite know how or if to handle it (there's only 3 weeks left of the year).

DD was home schooled for year 1 (school place nightmare) but adapted well to being in a class when she joined in Year 2. She reads well (is currently on level ten but can read higher levels in fiction easily, teacher refusing to move her up because she's not entirely fluent with non-fiction), expresses herself and her ideas well when speaking. She is a bit airy fairy combined with being a perfectionist when doing written work.

This is where the problem arises. All year her teacher has expressed concern about how much (or rather, how little) DD writes; I have tried lots of methods of supporting her and trying to encourage DD to get her ideas down on paper a bit quicker but I stop short of tutoring her or forcing her to do extra homework. She's in school at 7am and doesn't leave until 2 as it is.

Now, with three weeks to go her teacher is still saying that DD is not writing enough and that she will really struggle in year 3 as she rarely finishes a piece of work. I haven't seen her books since February so need to take teacher's word for this; I understand that DD's target is to write a full page during their 40 minute big write and she hasn't done that - her handwriting is small, I don't know how big the book is!

The teacher also claims that DD's national curriculum level will be marked down because she doesn't write enough.

I don't really give a rat's about her NC level. I do want her to be able to keep up with her year 3 work. When she writes she punctuates well, you can tell what she is trying to say and she uses connectives or whatever the current buzzword is! I didn't think volume of writing came into it? I understand that the less you write, the less you can show you know how to do.

Any ideas? Is this really a problem? Do I just ignore her teacher's concerns for the next three weeks and keep encouraging DD? Do I need to put an action plan in place please say no, she's a child?

Hello, I always thought it was more to do with quality rather than quantity? How ridiculous to be marked down because of the amount a child has written! anyways I'm not a teacher but.....

I see 2 things about your Dd which stand out. Firstly she is a perfectionist just like my Ds, Secondly she sounds like she has many many fantastic ideas going around in her mind at one time..again just like my Ds. If you put the 2 together it will cause some degree in quantity of written work IMO. Maybe your Dd needs a way to break down her ideas so that those ideas can be put onto paper?

I helped my Ds by using things such as a brainstorming web or a mind map, even a bullet point list so he only concentrated on each part of his written work at a time. He is slowly getting there now but the perfectionism continues to slow him down.

Does the teacher have any other concerns?

Thanks okie. Yep, we do the bullet points - I wrote her a list of 12 things we did over the weekend (was an extraordinarily busy weekend!) and she managed to write about 7 of them. I haven't seen the piece of work yet.

I don't think the teacher has any other concerns (other than what might be considered an obsession with fluently reading non-fiction books which are quite advanced for a 7 year old - you know the type, astronomy, photography, the brain and its functions...)

Am beginning to feel a bit like DD has had no praise because she hasn't managed to write the expected amount - difficult to tell, DD has adored her teacher (although does seem to have gone a bit quiet on the subject now.)

My year 5 DD still struggles to write a full page of an exercise book. Her teacher agrees with me she has a scientist brain and will write fact, fact, fact. She just does not do fluffiness inbetween. We aim for good quality well written, spelt correctly and punctuated correctly. Volume is never considered she is on target to get a 5C at the end of year 6 which is well above average.

I could never write very much at school, once we got to senior school I got all the praise for my science work because I could write accurately but concisely, when we had to summarise info in different subjects again I did extremely well and I went on to do sciences.

in primary school I was always being told I had to write more but it just didn't come naturally to me. I did start to write more once my parents pointed out that the teachers might think I can't do it or don't know it unless I can write it down for them so that helped because being a perfectionist I didn't like the idea of people thinking I didn't know something.

One of my secondary English teachers once said to me, "You haven't written enough but I can't think of anything you've left out"! I too am a scientist and write very concisely (or did pre-DC). Dd in year 4 is constantly being told to write less but of a higher quality; she tends to just download everything, which isn't what they are looking for. Her CT said she would rather have a few well-crafted sentences than the several pages of scrawled single clause ones that she gets. Science minded DS just can't think what to write unless it is a subject that interests him; he has inherited my complete lack of imagination.

I'm not a primary teacher but this sounds very familiar. My daughter is in year 5 now and has had similar comments for the past few years -although never any advice on how to help her improve (the teacher she had in y1 and 2 didn't comment on it, but she was a lovely teacher who completely 'got' my daughter and brought out the best in her). My daughter has always surpassed targets, her writing is of high quality but she struggled to get work finished. I think down to a combination of a great imagination, so lots of ideas in her head; perfectionism in terms of using the perfect words, grammar and handwriting; and an element of being easily distracted.

I always gave her lots of encouragement to work faster but it only just started to happen this year after the first parents evening. She's been in a composite class with year 6 this year so seen a lot of work going on in preparation for year 6 SATs. I decided to play on her perfectionism and explained that if she couldn't learn to work fast enough to get all of her good ideas down on paper then she mightn't achieve the marks she is capable of in future tests. At the second parents evening her teacher said that since the first she couldn't think of a single time my daughter hadn't got her work finished in the allotted time! Quite a turn around.

I suppose what I'm saying is don't worry too much, she'll get there.

I would also say the seating arrangement in her current class has worked well for her, she sits next to a boy who works at the same sort of level and is well behaved, they get on really well and work well together on joint tasks but I suspect they don't chat in the same was she would with other girls.

Another thing about my daughter (which I now recognise also affected me as a child) is because she reads a lot, and has been reading long books for years, in her head she associates good stories with thick books. This made writing a good (perfectionist remember) story in a lesson seem like quite an impossible task. So I've encouraged her to read some short stories and poems (she loves poems) to see good stories don't have to be long.

I'm a teacher. This is a common problem for a child at the end of year 2, due to start year 3 in September. The reason that a child needs to write more around this time is because as they enter year 3 the writing expectations widen. In order to inform you of your child's progress there has to be a certain amount of writing on the page - otherwise it is impossible to level it. For example going I to year 3 children are usually working towards a Level 3 in writing. However a key component of Level 3 is "child shows increasing awareness of paragraphs." Many children who write little in quantity do not show paragraphs - therefore they can not be assessed as being a Level 3. Obviously the if her the writing level, the more features of writing we need to see. It us just not possible to 'showcase' your writing if you do not write enough in the first place. Up until around year 2 thus us not as great a problem because assessing writing up to top Level 2 only asks for things such as evidence of full stops, ability to use commas in a list and capital letters. You can't possibly fit all the features of a Level 3 or 4 piece if writing into 6-8 sentences. I have often been marking writing and literally announced, "I can't give this a level because there isn't enough to level." Leveling a piece of writing is simply an assessment technique to hopefully track if your child is improving or not.

My DD struggled with this throughout years 1-4. She simply didn't write enough for the teacher to be able to accurately assess her work. They could see she had potential, but she just didn't write enough to prove it.
We tried playing games with her, doing 10 minutes of creative writing at home, encouraging her to add an extra line etc. etc.

Nothing really worked. Then, in year 5 she clicked and there is no stopping her.

Ahhh, The Big Write. How we hated it! My dc did it in junior school (Y3-Y6). It was a total and utter torment. The only good thing that came out of it was to increase their vocabularies. I can't imagine dc3 (Y2) doing it. There is absolutely no way he could sit still and write for40mins. He, too, doesn't write enough to assess - not unless he's writing about a subject that inspires him.

My understanding is that a secure level 2 is looked for at the end of Y2.

She sounds quite like my eldest ds. He's a perfectionist and his writing was always beautifully neat but oh my word he is so slow at writing. He's also quite dreamy.

His teachers have said similar to Layla and also that he doesn't finish work - so he will start a story beautifully but then it will stop dead mid way He has bags of imagination and is great at characterisation, spelling and grammar all good.

One of the most effective strategies I've seen used with him (in Year 3, so possibly age appropriate for your dd too) was an egg timer. His teacher agreed with him that he had one turn of the timer to think, then I think he had to write a phrase or sentence for each subsequent turn. (I assume the TA was keeping an eye to make sure he kept turning it) This really seemed to focus his mind. The other big step forward was him learning to join his writing, that really speeded things up too.

One thing we did at home was practise doing fast, less neat writing using a whiteboard and pen (he seemed less worried about it being messy as it was temporary). I set a timer on my phone and he challenged himself to write an increasing number of simple words (deliberately picked simple things he knew how to spell/didn't worry about the odd misspelling either) before the alarm went off. It was quite fun! I just wanted to introduce the idea that it wasn't a disaster if your work wasn't completely perfect.

Reminds me a bit of myself; apart from that my spelling and handwriting weren't fantastic at that age. I'm dyspraxic (and we discovered much much later, dyslexic); you couldn't stop me reading, now or as a kid, and I had tones of great ideas, but in primary school, confronted with a blank sheet of paper you would be lucky to get three lines (even by Y5)! It physically took me twice as long to write, and because of that I would get distracted.

My Y2 DD also doesn't write much, and doesn't like it. She'd rather be doing math or science experiments.

I do find it gets worse over the holidays. Even after April break - which wasn't so long - it took a while for us to get back to doing her weekly writing homework without tears (she needs to write a short story with her spelling list words).

I am worried that it will be even worse over the summer. I think I'll try to make sure that we write at least something every so often. Last summer she kept a reading diary to show to her new teacher. I think we'll try to do it again. Also - may try to get her to do a scrap book/diary of exiting things we do over the holidays. Anything to keep her writing at least something!!!

One of the best ways to encourage a child to write more is getting them to 'write for purpose.' A letter of complaint (they live this), a report, a piece of persuasion e.g. Write to the Headteacher to persuade him/her to extend play time, instructional text (personally hate these but kids love them) such as how to bake a cake (I change this to things like - how to make a grandma pie). Create a plays riot is a good one. Make it real - I wrote to studios and got sent a real auction with actor annotations from Coronation Street. When children see a purpose they approach it very differently. Try poetry archive website - real poets performing their poems.

Have a look at the 100 word challenge.

There are some great ideas (quite a few of which we've tried) here and I'm feeling a bit more reassured.

DD definitely has an imagination issue - thing is I can't quite decide whether she is lacking in imagination or just has too much and can't filter it down to one idea and talk about it. I thought it was lacking but she sounds quite like a lot of the DC on here!

We have a book called Games for Writing which is quite popular. I think we will work on a family scrap book this summer, we're going to be in the UK for a long time as DH will be having brain surgery