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Jacqueline

1. Establish limits. It’s OK if her story is only six or seven sentences long. Recopying a long story can ovrwhelm a seven-year-old.

2. If up to this point she has been writing as you dictate, try printing her story in on lined paper instead, skipping every other line. (Alternately, type it on the computer using a large, clean font.) Let her copy rather than write from dictation. As an additional aid, place a wide strip of construction paper beneath the line she’s copying from so she’s not distracted by other text. As she copies, she can slide the strip down line-by-line.

3. Before she begins copying, sit down together and talk about her narration. Ask her to find her favorite sentence, circle her three most descriptive words, and underline three great action verbs (or other favorite words). Ask her why she made these choices. She’ll be less likely to shorten her writing if she has already identified positive features!

4. Likewise, spend a moment praising some of her best words and sentences. She surely won’t want to shorten a sentence Mommy has fussed over!

5. Set a time limit for copying her narration—maybe 7 minutes because she’s age 7. When the timer goes off, she can stop, even mid-sentence. Let her do this once or twice a day. She can pick it up again the next day if need be. There’s no rush!

6. You didn’t mention the kinds of “mistakes” that upset her, but if they’re spelling errors, you can create a word wall at eye level from a sheet of butcher paper or poster board. If a word is giving her trouble, write it on a rectangle of paper and tape it to the word wall. When she recopies, it may be easier for her to look at the larger words on the word wall than to copy from your smaller printing on the paper. (When the wall gets full, remove the words she knows to make room for new ones.)

This may not solve all your problems, Jacqueline, but it will certainly get you started! Hope this helps.

I have just come upon your website. I am homeschooling my two children and am struggling a little with the 7-year-old and her creative writing.

I think the problem is perfectionism! She can write (joined handwriting) nicely and she has good ideas. She can spell reasonably for her age- she is reading herself and we read to our children a lot.

BUT despite the fact that she is happy to create stories and get me to dictate them, whenever it comes to writing them out herself, she becomes upset by ‘mistakes’ and starts to shorten her originally long and interesting sentences to avoid having to write them out in their entirety. I try tobe encouraging and am always telling her mistakes are part of the process but she really freezes up so writing things down turns into a rather tense chore.

I am a writer myself! But I worry that somehow I have made the process ardous for her. I would love any advice you may have to offer. Needless to say my second child is totally uninhibited when it comes to producing stories and does’t worry at all.