Galaxy Girl,
Is it the handwriting or writing composition that your son dislikes?
Delbows, good question. He's had some frustrations over fine motor skills in the past couple years, but those were more related to drawing/art projects than to writing. In K, he had trouble learning to hold his pencil properly (did the fist grip) but it didn't bother him at all, just bothered the teacher. We worked with him and he corrected it pretty quickly. In 1st grade, he had a HUGE prolonged crying fit/tantrum one day when the teacher said they couldn't draw stick figures anymore but had to use "shapes" to draw people instead. He couldn't do it easily and everyone else could... later he said he was upset because he realized he was going to be the last one done, and he's usually the
first one done for everything. So it was a big ego blow. In 2nd grade, similar type of tantrum when asked to draw a self-portrait in a very specific way (couldn't just do his own thing). This year, a meltdown over an art project that wasn't turning out the way he had pictured it in his head... but it was a brief meltdown; his teacher talked him through it and he got over it quickly and got back to work (and ended up being happy with the project after all).
However, with the writing, I think his frustration is related more to writing composition... especially the process of organizing/planning/mapping out ahead of time, and also having to take care of little details afterward (checking punctuation, etc.). He's more of a "big picture" guy. He gets frustrated when asked to organize
anything in detail. His sisters seem to love the little detail work. Ask them to put away Lego blocks, for example, and they might just decide to sort them all by color first. They find that fun, but stuff like that drives him nuts... he'll be rolling his eyes at them and yelling "just throw the Legos in the box and get it over with already!" He's generally impatient about most things, wants to get to the destination, not smell the roses along the way. (Sometimes we call him "latte boy" -- remember the commercials where the woman orders a latte, then two seconds later says "Is my latte ready yet?")
I think having to "map out" the writing feels like a pointless chore to him. He gets equally frustrated with math problems that say "explain your answer." He'll say, "But I
know the answer is correct; why do I have to explain how I got there?" (Similar to DD5 saying, before we changed schools at the start of this year: "If I already know that word is CAT, why do I have to say 'Kuh - Ah - Ttt'?" when the teacher wanted her to sound out simple words she could read years ago.)
By the way, I love the idea for your daughter to write the holiday letter. That's a great project.
Thanks for your input.
