Writing

Writing is the subject parents ask for last and the one that most often needs the work. Children get stuck at three places: getting anything onto the page at all, sentence construction, and structuring something longer than a paragraph.

I do not start with grammar exercises. I start by getting the child to say the sentence out loud, then write down what they said. Most 'poor writers' at primary age are perfectly good talkers who have never been shown that the two are connected.

A lot of primary writing here is taught by copying model compositions. That gets a child through a term test and leaves them unable to write anything they have not memorised, so we do not do it.

Handwriting and spelling come into it where they are the actual barrier, and are left alone where they are not.