What age child do you think did this writing?

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I'm concerned daughter is behind, but haven't had any communication from school, despite asking. I'll attach photos to show examples of her writing.

1. What age would you expect this from?
2. Any suggestions to improve?

Thank you.

Reception age?

4/5

Reception. DD's school teaches cursive from the off though so it's hard to judge

My reception aged DD writes a bit more neatly than that (not much more)

Also 4/5 - Reception/early Y1.

My son's writing was like that in F2 (reception) but of course children all develop at their own pace.

Reception, although my DS was writing like that in year one.

Reception or Year 1

4/5. I’d ask to speak to teachers if you’re concerned and see what they suggest.

Early reception

Could be anywhere from reception up to y2 depending on the child. Have the school suggested that it's a problem, and if so what are they doing to help? I have tried the fat triangular ergonomic pencil grips that you put the pencil through to help my own dc who struggles with handwriting. Not sure if it's helped. Trying to encourage any writing based activities is helpful.

4-5, it looks a lot like DS's work this time last year. He has come on a lot since despite lockdown and barely getting home-schooled.

She 4/5

4 to 6? Ds writes like this (yr1, 6 and a bit) but I think he's probably at the lower end of ability tbh! Also haven't had any communication from school and as he's excellent at reading and pretty switched on generally I'm not bothered at the mo!

*age I mean

What I did notice is when the handwriting went much smaller and neater - so they just need reminding of that and having the expectation.

They look like they are applying Phase 3 phonics and need more teaching of Phase 4/5 phonics to begin to spell more accurately - if they don’t get have that phonics knowledge they won’t be able to apply it to writing.

How are they with sentences? Can they think/say/write/check a simple sentence with phonically decodable (not necessarily accurate) words and spaces?

I’d be working on simple sentence construction, use of the phonics they do know to attempt letters, trying to learn to spell a few common tricky words (the, is, a, and etc) to support them and full stops/spaces.

That all depends how old they are and what they’ve covered in school!

Age 4 I’d say (Reception teacher)

Reception.

I've worked with children aged 4/5 up to age 9 who have written like that. The older ones had significant learning differences relating to literacy.

4-5yrs

Looks like my DS’s at age about 8-9. I worried at the time, but he’s now 13 and excelling in all his subjects, so I’m glad I didn’t worry too much.

4ish? It’s what my eldest’s handwriting looked like at the start of reception.

Practice is the only thing we’ve found works. They do Read Write Inc at school so I bought the red ditty books and red get writing books. You read a few lines in one book, then fill in blanks to recreate a sentence, write a full sentence and then practice 6 individual letter shapes. There’s 3 sets of stories / exercises per book.

We’ve also done ‘sentence starters’ for free form sentence and spelling work from Twinkl. There’s, say a picture of a dinosaur and the sentence starts ‘the dinosaur is’ and they have to think of something themselves and then write it, working out how to spell the word they want themselves.

DC1 also likes writing letters, so we bought her some paper/note let’s and envelopes to write on. She’s inherited my love of stationary, so has asked for coloured index cards, postit notes, coloured and glittery gel pens etc when in the likes of b&m and home bargains and she spends hours writing on them.

Work out what she likes and she’ll want to practice.

Reception. Early-mid réception though although I’m not sure there’s enough writing there to make a proper judgement.

How is she with composing and writing a simple sentence.

Reception, it’s hard to give advice as the only word I can make out is ‘breakfast’. Perhaps get practising writing shorter words first and using her phonics to sound them out.

I would say first half of Reception.