Hi Curious, i suppose the answer to this question depends on whether or not he understands what he's expected to do and feels he is capable of doing it! What form does the homework take?

How comfortable is your son with writing? He may not have been given any writing homework so far because they have been doing plenty of writing practice in class, and the teacher has waited until most of the class are confident at forming letters before sending home any homework.

One thing we did with Olly was get him some wipe-clean boards with the alphabet printed on (we also bought him the number ones, because his writing was a bit spidery and mad). They only take a minute or two, and really did help him improve his letter formation and recognition. Also, you can get fridge magnets with Year R's words printed on, we had those on our dishwasher and rather than making them a chore, we'd write silly sentences to each other. 

Does your son's school do Jolly Phonics? If they do, Amazon do the tricky words in the shape of flowers, we bought those and blu-tacked them all over the house on doors, I'd write Olly a treasure-hunt list of words and he'd have to go and search for 'see, say, so, sea' etc. It really helped encourage him to read, because he's more of a do-er than a thinker. 

To be honest though, school should be asessing what stage your son is at and working with him on that level. It can be quite daunting going in and tackling the teachers but go and speak to them, tell them about your concerns and ask how best to help at home. They really do like to see parental involvement, especially at this stage when it can make so much difference in such a short time. 

Hi, I know this doesn't address the issue of what is being sent home from school but it may help with the letters you mention that he has trouble with.

http://www.theschoolrun.com/writing-practice-how-help-your-struggling-child

(not that I'm saying he's struggling of course!  just that it may contain a few pointers for you)

ursh x

At our school, letter formation appears to be left until later on.  In Reception, they did patterns to trace to encourage pencil control, and practised writing their names every morning (marker pens on wipe clean boards - really great with white polo shirts, LOL).  Other writing was more aimed at vocabulary and spelling.  Then as the children became more confident, and especially after the move to Y1, more focus is given to actual letter shapes and sizes.

I suspect this is because writing lines and lines of letters is just so boring!  I certainly wouldn't have wanted stuff like that as homework as I know the boys would probably have refused to do it! Also a lot of Reception children just don't have the fine pencil control to form letters correctly so trying to force it would be counter-productive.

I have a dotty font and make my own handwriting worksheets for my daughter, and they have arrows that show what direction to start writing the letter.  Work bought me the font for making resources when I was teaching English as a foreign language to complete beginners (including phonics and handwriting) and it's come in very handy for homeschooling.  I've also made other handwriting resources for my daughter like laminated worksheets - you print out the letters you want her to practice (really large size like 200pts or similar) then laminate it, and your child can trace over them with a marker pen.

There might be some free handwriting resources online, including free dotty fonts, but it would be best to check with the teacher what style he's learning at school so you don't confuse him by teaching him a different style at home.  As I'm homeschooling I don't have to worry about that.

If you can't get a dotty font you could try a regular font in the correct style and print it in a pale colour and your child can trace over that.

My daughter does some spelling practice without forming the letters correctly but only because she wants to write letters rather than (e.g.) selecting magnetic letters for spelling.  I think it's better for kids to learn to form the letters correctly before they do any serious amount of writing, but on the other hand I don't want to curb my daughter's enthusiasm, so I'm letting her do spelling practice with misformed letters and also teaching her that there's a right way to form letters too and she practices that separately.