Writing and a Huge Thank You!!

I just want to say a huge thankyou to Ruth and Sarah who reminded me that HE children don't have to be up to school based standards or levels.

I have been really worried about J's speed of writing lately but thinking about it his writing is much neater now then it ever was when he was at school. I always struggled to read his written work at school and when he first came out. It was really hard work to decipher it so I suppose that its no good being able to write fast in an exam if no one can read it. At school they only taught them to write cursively which I personally thought was a mistake at the time anyway. We stopped him writing cursively eventually and his writing is much neater now for it. He has done two pieces of written work - one in print and one cursively and they are both a huge improvement on his written work in school.

I wonder if his lack of writing speed is due to his reading and spelling skills. I am hoping that as his reading improves further than his writing speed and spelling will also improve.

I know that he hated doing any sort of writing when he first came out of school whereas now he will do writing off his own back even if he forgets how to spell words that I thought he would know. He has recently written 2 really good pieces on Wars and Ancient Egypt that was totally of his own back and what he had written was very good but the spelling was atrocious. We have gone back to basics a lot with spelling and I am concentrating on building his confidence with it so we are currently working through Prime Ed's 'My Spelling Workbook B'. He probably could go on to Book C at least already but he is getting them all right and it is transferring into his written work so I don't want to push him too hard or it will put him off writing again.

Sarah, thank you for reminding me what a good storyteller he is. We do a lot of Charlotte Mason style Narration here too and I don't even have to ask for one anymore he just does it and they are much more thorough then I expected. If I was to ask for a written narration it wouldn't be anything like as thorough as he would be worrying about getting it down on paper.

We do lots of read alouds and are always up to our maximum amount of library books on all our cards. I am thinking of getting dh to join too so we can get even more lol!!

Thank you both of you for your reassurances. We are where we are and that's that but we are slowly making progress.