Should she really be held back in reading because of her writing? I learned from another mom, with a child in an older grade in the G&T class, that they combine the reading and writing instruction together like this. There is no separate writing block or reading block.
Have any of you ever come across this problem? How should I approach this.... let it be... or request that dd be moved up and accommodate her writing? I really can't understand how putting a child 1-2 years behind in reading due to poor writing output is a good idea.
Agree with polarbear.
I'll also add, here, that this has ALWAYS been an issue for DD, right from the start.
You can hothouse writing skills, but it's mostly ineffective w.r.t. changing things a lot until they have the executive functions developed to make use of what you're trying to show them (organizing, etc.)
If the gap is only a year or two, I'd leave it alone. For now.
That may shift rapidly once she is 9-12 yo, by the way-- and at that point, I'd PUSH for higher literacy instruction.
In our case, this has been one of the biggest bummers of public schooling; integrated language arts curriculum... low level reading, and writing tied with shackles to that reading level. {sigh}
Our answer has been to let school be what it is, and to basically afterschool
reading and literature as a thing all its own. Any gap of more than about 2y is
really hard to manage using an integrated language arts approach.
DD's gap has been as much as 6 or more years. Just not feasible, really, to ask a child who can't yet adequately construct a paragraph with a meaningful topic sentence to "write" about reading when that reading is... er... Dickens or Shakespeare or something. KWIM? I mean, you can hothouse the skills, but you just aren't going to make up for a gap like that, and it feels punitive to the student to have to work THAT hard, when they don't get any of the "good stuff" in their area of strength. {which, I suppose, is also a way of saying that kids with a great deal of asynchrony probably are not well-served by such curriculum integrations in the first place}
