Excellent reading ability, poor writing ability

[Towmcir]

Hi

My daughter is in year 4 and at the end of last year her report was very much “excellent reader, needs to work on writing”.

She is keen enough to work on this at home so we did over summer, but hand on heart I know she’s made next to no progress. She writes slowly, constantly gets distracted, never knows what to write and just finds writing very hard generally. It can take her 15 minutes to write a short paragraph.

On the other hand, her reading is exceptional (she will read and understand anything we put in front of her, on Accelerated Reader she’s at 5.0 - 7.4). She reads with ease and loves it, although when reading out loud she seems to be very much reading by sight and sometimes slips up/misses individual words when she has predicted them wrong.

Writing has always been a weak point, but it seems that over the last year it’s become much more noticeable to her and the differential between reading and writing ability is causing problems with her ability groupings at school on occasion because they are so wildly different.

Maths is distinctly average if this is relevant!

Does anyone have any comments or suggestions on this before I approach the teacher? He is lovely and I get the feeling he will be helpful, I just don’t want to appear too demanding if this really is a non-issue.

Maybe she has developmental language disorder thedldproject.com/developmental-language-disorder-dld/

Is there any chance she could be hypermobile or have some other physical issues that makes it difficult for her to get her hand to do what she wants. Have you tried seeing if typing out her ideas is any easier? You may find the quality of what she writes is better that way, due to not loosing her train of thought while writing.

Just adding to this - can anyone recommend any handwriting workbooks that are aimed at KS2/7 year olds? I saw one yesterday but although the content would have been useful it looked really babyish, more for 4 year olds.

I would focus less on the workbooks and more on what they are writing with as that can make a huge difference and building up the muscles in the fingers by doing lots of colouring etc.

Thank you, maybe I should take him to a shop and try a few different pens? . Neither of mine have really had any interest in colouring and until recently the one I'm a bit worried about was very reluctant to write at home. Over the last few days I've managed to get him to write a few sentences so we'll see if that continues. It's a fine line between supporting him to practice and putting him off by having a battle about it....

I was thinking of the workbooks more to spark an interest and motivate him to do it.

We used the Write from the Start books at a similar age for work on fine motor control and muscle memory for forming the letter shapes.

DS finds pen easier than pencil (thankfully no pen licences at his school!) and he gets on well with a Stabilo Easy pen.

Thank you, I will look into those books. And the pens.

Sounds a bit ADHD to me,

• hurries through reading, skipping words
• verbally jumps about, gets easily sidetracked, loses sight of the plot.
• writing is difficult and slow, often forgets what she was going to write.

I would read up on ADHD in girls and see if she has any other traits.

My child, many many moons ago, was like this. I figured that it might be because her hand couldn't write the words as quickly as she was thinking them.

I taught her a very simplified mind mapping technique, where she's break down what she wanted to say into small chunks, then concentrate only on one chunk at a time.

it kind of worked. I'd still proof read her homework and ask her to read back a sentence where she's either used the wrong word, or omitted it. She'd consistently read out what she wanted to say, not what she'd written. So I'd block of the rest of the sentence and ask her to read each word (that was fun 😐) until she got the problem.

Even now, in advanced middle age, they will still miss steps out when describing an incident or giving instruction.