Help! Dc 7 is awful at setting out / presenting his work, it’s so untidy. When will this improve?

[Watermelon999]

Advice please...

Ds is in year 3. Has a tendency to rush through work and gets cross when I ask him to slow it down and take care. This makes home schooling fraught at times, especially by Friday when we are all tired.

He makes silly mistakes, writing is not legible, crosses out, writes above the lines etc, and it ends up looking a total mess. When he slows down it is neater, but then the mistakes are still there, so then things still need to be crossed out.

Is this a boy thing? Or being young in the year? Is there anything I should do? Should I flag it up? Or is it normal at this age?

My older dcs are girls, and never were like this despite being summer birthdays. Both were neat and wrote pages. It’s like trying to get blood out of a stone doing half a page and we end up with illegible scrawl unless I sit there all the way through, which I don’t always have time to do.

There is no problem with his maths ability (apart from again the presentation, which can lead to silly mistakes), or his general intelligence. It’s very frustrating though.

DD1's year 3 books were full of comments telling her off for presentation. She improved it rapidly when she decided to in year 4 and she wanted the much loathed pen licence (my other child has dyspraxia so I loathe the fucking things).

DD2 is currently that age - her work is a right mess but it's because of her dyspraxia (DD1's was just a rush job). I tend to focus on content for most stuff, neatness for handwriting practice and just aim for relatively legible presentation the rest of the time. Prior to this year she typed most of her work because she's well aware of her handwriting issues - but this teacher is being a bit adamant on that one.

One that does work with DD2 when she's all over the place with letter size (but takes an age to prepare for) is highlighted paper - either download some, or highlight the bottom half of each writing line so she can see more clearly where the lower case letters are meant to go.

I have the same with my son in year 3 at the moment, his handwriting and presentation of work were a mess. Didn't realise how bad it was until this years lockdown started. I've been working hard with him the last two weeks to try and improve this.