At 7, your DS still is very young. Could there be some old fashioned asynchrony going on? Has he displayed proficiency with other fine motor skills?
Asynchrony certainly. His fine motor skills used to be poor compared with many agemates, and I think this got him off on the wrong foot with writing (if I'd been home eding him, I would not have been pushing writing at the point when he started school). Now, though, I think his fine motor skills are fine; I can't think of a task other than writing/colouring than he seems to have more trouble with than others do.
(Incidentally, watching him practise a loud piano piece with fast quavers he other day, I wondered whether and how much his piano practice has contributed to his improvement in writing. Certainly in some sense his fingers are much stronger now than they were; I'm not sure whether it's a relevant sense.)
Maybe the school would let him give oral responses or accept parental scribing to reduce some of his writing load as you work on his written output.
The school (bless it) has no written homework, so there's no occasion for parental scribing: all the writing he does for school is done in the classroom. I don't honestly think he needs accommodation as such. They do plenty of talking etc., so it's not as though he doesn't have the chance to explore topics orally, and they're well aware of the gap between what he can say and what he writes.
I would hope that the school would be willing to work with you. Telling a child to write faster when there may be a physical or mental challenge will only make him write slower. They unwittingly may be contributing to his anxiety. I would try to get the school involved in working through a solution.
Hard to explain. It isn't exactly that he's anxious while writing - he rather tends to drift off! He's anxious now about the higher expectations he expects to meet, but it doesn't seem to have been a source of great anxiety during school terms. I think his teachers so far have been doing a good job of encouraging and redirecting him, and certainly his output has been increasing steadily. (They choose their own targets - so "write faster" is his crude instruction rather than theirs!) I certainly will step in if there does seem to be a problem once school starts (next week) but I rather expect that they'll handle it fine. It seemed more productive to take a "what can we do about this, then?" rather than a "there there never mind" attitude at home when the issue came up, that's all.
Good luck with you DD; it sounds as though you have a plan, I hope it works.
