What age to begin writing and how to begin??

So, when you say writing, are you asking about the actual letter and word formation, or what we would probably call ‘composition’?

From what I have learned here, the CM method for handwriting and letter formation would be short periods of copywork executed very carefully to give the child the habit of doing the writing with excellence. At our house, we use a timer and the child carefully copies a selection for anywhere from 5 – 15 minutes, depending on their age and ability level. So, perfect (by that I mean, best effort) execution in copywork comes first.

Once the child is trained to make letters properly and to the best of his ability, he should begin to do copywork of beautiful and interesting sentences and ideas.

Next is oral narration, or the habit of listening and then telling back to you what was read.

Prepared dictation and eventually, written narrations would follow when the child is orally narrating with excellence.

That is kind of the ‘scope and sequence’ of the CM language arts as I understand it. SCM has a resource in their store called, “Hearing and Reading, Telling and Writing” which may help. Also, the all day seminar was a terrific resource for me when I was transitioning to pure CM principles in our homeschool.

Hope that helps! You might also search for a question I had about writing (compositions) a few days ago. There were loads of wonderful thoughts about writing on that thread! I think it is under “Writing – What do you do?”.

At 6 and 8, my DC were writing sentences.  At those ages we did lots of poetry copywork.  My youngest would write a line each day, and my DD would write a 4 lined stanza.  I was more concerned with the quality of their writing then the quantitiy…it was how much they could write in 5 minutes or so.  If they aren’t ready for sentences, start with just a word or two and work up to sentences.

I found my DS needed to copy the words directly bellow the written-out passage instead of copying it from a book or whiteboard.  He’s gotten quite a bit better about this, but it still takes him a bit longer if the passage is not directly above where he is writing.  

You can use just about anything for coypwork!  Poetry, hymns, sentences from read-alouds or phonics readers, etc.  There are some copywork books on SCM (purchased and free) that would be ready to go.  There are also lots of free printables on the internet as well as sites where you can type in your own words to make a printable copywork page.  We try to use a variety of sources to keep it interesting.

Yes, I would say 4.5 is too young to start hand writing.

Some children are ready, and have those fine motor skills, but for most it is a lot of hard work. At 4.5 we stick with coloring and big motor skills (like drawing big on a white board).

If the child truly is ready and has the fine motor skills you could start with writing, but not words, I would move into simple drawing shapes and simple letter shapes.

Keep it fun 🙂 There is no rush into writing. Writing is a bit of an exhausting exercise (even for me, when I write I realize what a workout it is for hands, much harder than typing) 🙂

Just as an aside, have you had your oldest assessed by an OT? By 8 years old, a child should be more than capable of printing their letters and numbers without difficulty. It doesn’t necessarily mean they enjoy it, but they should be capable of doing it. In fact by 8, they should be physically capable of words and at least 1-2 sentences. If he is truly having physical difficulty with this, then you would be smart to get an assessment with occupational therapy done. There could be a host of issues going on which may be causing these difficulties. The sooner you can start intervention, the better.