DD - Year 2 - is struggling with her writing. Do the struggling catch up during Year 2 or could this be indicative of a problem?

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Dd is nearly 7. Her writing is not very good compared to her peers and she has been selected by her teacher to the Teodorescu-Perceptuo programme. DD does a little every night at home.

Her handwriting is all over the place but her writing is also very difficult to understand. She writes very quickly, misses out vowels and whole syllables and does not write in a phonetic manner that anyone else can decipher. i.e. the word multi was written as mote yesterday.

She's in tears not wanting to go to school because they are having to write more. DD is a sensitive little thing so I suspect that she does not ask the teacher when she needs help and may have experienced being told that she needed to try harder or do better over the past few weeks since she started year 2. She's clearly worried about getting it wrong and is now anxious about her writing.

She reads fluently, she's good at maths and design, she has an expressive, vast, spoken vocabulary. Is it just a case of practise and she'll start to improve and catch up by the time Year 2 is over? or should I be concerned that this could be an ongoing difficulty? What can I do to help her at home without making her more anxious?

Thank you.

What are her fine motor skills like in other respects? Does she like Hama beads, colouring, threading, craft work, anything like that?

Her fine motor skills are good. Very good in fact. She was able to do up buttons from an early age and she's good at tieing laces, beading etc...

You say she doesn't write phonetically, is it worth going back to basics and going over the jolly phonics system again?

You say she doesn't write phonetically, is it worth going back to basics and going over the jolly phonics system again?

My DS is a year older and has similar problems. I think a great part of the problem is the fact that like your DD he has a very wide,extensive vocabulary, and a huge imagination. He gets very frustrated at not being able to write quickly enough to get his ideas down, and also at not being able to spell the words he wants to use. He also hates writing. THe school don't seem to be too worried about it, and have explained it as above. I have already noticed some improvement since he started Y3. I think that there is no underlying problem, and his writing will catch up eventually.

Thank you for your responses. They are reassuring.

It could be worth going over some phonics again. She struggled with phonics when learning to read too. It did not seem to come naturally to her but then something clicked developmentally and reading took off (only about 6 months ago).

I'm not sure that mote is a world away from multi - if it was molte it would be almost exactly phonetic (as well as bi-lingual)!

I think mote is a good attempt at multi actually, she just forgot the l.

Could it be worth teaching her how to form all the letters properly again? I did this with DS as I realised he didn't actually know how for for the letters properly and was just trying his hardest but getting frustrated.

I set aside ten minutes each morning and sat down with him and for ten minutes just practiced writing one letter, over and over again, forming it properly, we worked through the whole alphabet, one letter a day, reviewing the letters we had already done every few days, and when we had finished the laphabet I got him to stard writing, ten minutes a day, just to keep the practice up. I didn;t work on spellings, just on getting him to write quicker and with better handwriting.

We have doen this for a year now and his writing speed and confidence has vastly improved. He still does the wrinting practice, ten minutes each morning after breakfast, and knows this is why he is finding it easier in school now.

Sounds very much like my DD it actually took until Yr5 to become legible, they in Yr6 for her writing to become almost neat.

My dd is dyslexic - so cannot read yet - but one of the main difficulties she has with writing is that she doesn't seem to hear the sounds in words properly so it can be difficlut for her to write words as she will miss sounds out or write them in a different way (as she hears them differently). Her hearing is fine - it is just she processes the sounds differently (I think). Reviewing "sounding out" with your dd may help

My DD2 is in Year 2 and her writing is also all over the place. Not to mention of varying sizes. Pencil holding also not very consistent. But she is doing fine otherwise and if i remember correctly (four year gap) DD1 was also far from neat at that age. Anyway I plan to see what the teacher thinks at parents' evening next month.

I had a word with her teacher and she moved her into a lower group and let her go and work with the LSA. It helped and DD produced a good piece of written work. The teacher thinks she may just be suffering a crisis of confidence as she prefers structured work.