I have a poor writer in an AMI Montessori school and this is not an issue. In fact, sometimes I wish he were forced to write a little more.
I have a lot of confidence in my children's teacher, but I know there are other children in the classroom who are not producing perfect written work either, especially not the first years.
I would try to determine how much of your son's standards are self-imposed. Perhaps he is just writing too much by choice or his is unclear about expectations, or he was given an older mentor who writes a lot and drew the wrong conclusion..... He's in first grade, it's no biggie if he just writes, "I did the bead frame." He doesn't need to describe the process and analyze his conclusions. If it were my son I would give him a list of canned sentences for each type of work and have him practice writing them at home in the same type of notebook. Then he has a fallback when he gets overwhelmed. He's motivated to write so let him take a shortcut for a little while until he gets up to speed. He'll elaborate more as he develops. Yes, it's a crutch but I think it's OK. The task is not as hard as he thinks and this would be a way of demonstrating that.
I'd also try to get a look at that notebook and confirm the expectations in terms of cursive/italic and how much he's supposed to be writing. I would be very interested if it were more than just a list of what he did. That just doesn't seem age-appropriate.
P.S. I agree with your son that looking at the board and transferring the words to the notebook is hard.
