If my 8 year old "isn't writing enough", how much is enough?

[AnInginAneAnA]

Is there an expected amount of words? Does the teacher count words in story writing?

Is the question the same as - how long is a piece of string?

Who has said he's not writing enough?
Does he understand the meanings of words?
We have a bright ds who has aspergers. He hates literacy at school, but left to his own devices at home on the pc, he will write stories etc without any problems. He rarely completes or even starts any tasks set for him in school.

She is not writing enough according to the teacher trigger.

I just wondered if there are some general guidelines, or people could say how much their dc write for story writing....?

my ds varies from writing a few lines to nearly a side of A4 (every other line!). It is very much dependant on his mood at the time but he is capable of writing when he wants to or is able to.

Has your dd teacher told you what she expects? Do you feel she isn't writing enough? I would chat to the teacher and tell them your concerns. There maybe simple solutions which would help.

I think (as a nursery nurse and a home educator) it very much depends on their interest of the subject for example a story involving a cat and his adventure might take a page in a school book but ask for information on dinosaurs and theres no end to what they might write ....I suppose its horses for courses I did used to say I expect at least a full page of writing on this but then when you have 2/3rds of excellent work and a 1/3 of rambling the extra work is wasted really-generally what I might suggest if a piece of work is too short - what happened then? oh you didnt mention this bit -what can you add? etc etc.

It entirely depends on how long the teacher has given- is it a one lesson job or a longer story the class have been writing over a week or so? As I don't know your dd I'll go with what I'd expect a middle ability 8 year old... for one lesson when they've been given a decent chunk of it for writing I would expect around 3/4 of an A4 page. For a longer story it varies more but around 2 pages.

Does the teacher give guidelines to the children as they are writing? E.g. you should have finished the intro/written 1/2 a page by now etc?

I had a girl in my class last year who was a real daydreamer and sometimes produced almost nothing. In the end a softly softly approach worked best- 'well done, you've written 2 good sentences. Tomorrow I'd like you to write 3' etc.

We've just had parents' evening and my DD 's 'stories' were typically about 3 sides in her exercise book - I don't know whether they were written in one session or longer though

That doesn't sound like not enough to me. Perhaps go in and ask how much the teacher is expecting. Quality is more important than quantity, although children who write very little can't possibly produce all of the aspects of writing the teacher will be looking for. Doesn't sound like this is the case for your dd though...

Sorry, didn't check back to the top and got you mixed up with op, pantomime

Thank you for the responses, I will phone and see if I can get a chat with the teacher, looking at ways to deal with this.

DD is a daydreamer, she has excellent reading/language ability, her writing is cursive, but she does tend to engrave the page, with very closely written words, so there is very little space between each word.

She has written stories at home, which are very imaginative, with pictures etc. over several pages, but she is not a prolific writer - though she is a prolific story teller and generally talks a lot.

As she is a higher ability reader it may be that her writing has the potential to be high level 3-ish. If she is not writing enough then she won't be including everything that is needed for this level, which may be what the teacher means. For example, she will have needed to include a variety of puntuation, conjunctions and sentence types- difficult in half a page, say. I'm only second guessing here though! Hope you and the teacher find a suitable way to help her

It depends on the type of writing but for a "story" type piece I would be looking for 100+ words however quality wins over quantity