Mon gave you excellent advice. My 12 year old is loves loves writing and is extremely prolific. She's the child that if I really needed to keep her occupied when she was bored or if I needed to get her temporarily busy so I could do something else, all I had to do was to tell her to write a story. This is what we've done for her and it's worked out well (so far):
1) Wordly Wise for vocab.
2) Sending her to local short-term writing camps - they come up frequently in our area but aren't advertised widely. Some of them I've found through watching the bulletin board at our local homeschool place, others I've found by watching our school district website. There are also young writer's workshops and groups that you can find through our local library. Sometimes even just a google search with "young writers + (your city)" will turn up opportunities and events.
3) Let her read to her heart's content - I'm a firm believer that the more you read the better developed your writing will become.
4) Encourage her to follow her imagination, give her lots of opportunities for play, take her to interesting events and places and talk talk talk about them. She doesn't actually need practice "talking" (she's very good at that - to the point it's annoying lol!)... but it's all about nurturing her creative thoughts.
5) Give her workbooks to work on that focus specifically on grammar, editing, and also genre in writing. I'm not generally a workbook-oriented person, but my dd likes them and they can be worked on briefly and set aside so they're convenient when she has little chunks of time here and there with nothing to do.
6) Take her to talks given by local authors.
DD does well on spelling tests, but when she writes, she is a horrible speller!! I would like to know a way to help her fine tune her writing and give her the chance to run with her imagination.
I wouldn't focus on her spelling (which I would like to kick myself for saying!). Here's the deal - I am a great speller and I think it's important. None of my children spell worth a darn while they are writing - they just weren't born to be great spellers and when they are writing they are using their brain for the other multiple tasks that go into writing. If you want to give your dd room to exercise her creativity, give her spell-check or word prediction and have her use a keyboard. If she's handwriting, don't worry about the spelling. Focus on the content of her writing, not the mechanics
School will most likely help her with spelling
Best wishes,
polarbear
