Trust me when I say even the most incourrigible child always turns on a spectacular show once at school It's a different environment at school and I'm sure once she is there she will be fine (cause she knows every last one of your buttons and exactly how to push them) but with teachers it is different - plus they have 3-4 years at Uni and endless amounts of classroom experience to know how to engage a child in learning. Paige was 5 a few days ago and has been able to write her own name for a fair while now, but it started with her writing gibberish on a page and calling it letters. She would take her note book and pencil and just sit and write pages and pages of what looked to me like scribble across the page but to her it was a story. I did all the *right* things with #1 child and would sit for hours with work books that I brought, but by the time I got to DD2, I didn't have the time and she just wasn't into *formal* type stuff like that. It is hard enough at times to get her to do her speechie homework but this was the one thing she really liked to do - still does like - and it was the basis of her being able to write properly using proper words. She will get there, and one thing to remember is that with her speech issues, it could also be making it hard for it all to gel inside her head kwim?