DS Writing

[Giraffefantastico]

Hi all

My son is in Y2 and really struggling with his writing. His reading is on track, something that he loves and we read together every night.

Writing is a totally different story. He is struggling with so many different aspects of it. Formation of letters, spacing is sporadic, no punctuation and his spelling is mainly phonetic.

I am worried looking at the homework that he is receiving. It is clear to me that he is unable to make a decent attempt at what is being asked of him because he has not yet grasped the fundamentals. I feel like this is damaging his confidence.

I have raised with school without success and will continue to do so. Up to now he has always been graded as working at the expected level, but I really do not understand how!

In the meantime I feel like I should be supporting him at home at a more basic level. I want to try and make this as fun as I can and I also really don’t want to damage his confidence any more as he does get really upset his writing.

Any advice or suggestions would be so helpful. I feel like I don’t know where to start!!

Sort of the same with my year 1 son, although I appreciate that we’re still at a younger age and it might not be as big of an issue yet.

My son has terrible writing, but the school maintain “it’s fine”. He is doing great in reading, maths and other general subjects. His writing is starting to be so bad it’s holding him back in other subjects, which made us feel we had to act.

It’s unfortunate that there’s no way to teach proper writing on an app that makes it feel like a game to a child as we know our son would love this. We are looking for spelling games, but it’s the physical writing we’re struggling with mostly.

At the end of reception we turned to bribery and had a tiny chocolate for each line of writing and trying to do a page a day before any screen time. This could be copying words, free writing, alphabet etc but we always concentrated on formation and sizing so the handwriting itself. It felt like it took forever, there were lots of tears but we did make progress and after several months things were broadly legible.

It’s so hard to be supportive and not get frazzled at the terrible attempts/tears but it was so worthwhile for us because it has opened up the other subjects again. We’ve accepted he’ll never be a neat writer though!

Thanks, it is encouraging that you noticed improvements relatively quickly. I wish we’d started to act a bit sooner.

I don’t mind bribery if it gets results!

I hated the idea of bribery in principle, because it was encouraging him to see writing as boring in my mind.

When it came to it, I realised he was totally stuck in a rut with finding writing hard because he needed to practice and not wanting to write because he found it hard so I had to do something. When it came to it, a few chocolate buttons seemed like a win-win and he sits and does his other homework without bribery so it’s now much more of a “home from school, 10 minutes writing with a snack” routine like feel than it used to be.

I will say it takes a huge amount of my time sitting with him and going through how to do each letter, but absolutely worth it if it stops him getting frustrated by not being a good enough writer to keep up in the subjects he enjoys.

Kids vary massively in skill - and it doesn't necessarily relate to intellect. My son was like yours at age 10. He has come on a great deal in the last couple of years but spelling and handwriting not great. However he passed the 11+ and attends a very academic school. He doesn't receive any additional support ATM but school are keeping an eye. Academically, he more than holds his own so just hope examiners can read his paper.

I did the Magic Link handwriting Programme with my son - it really did help