My daughter's handwriting is pretty poor (even though she is good at other fine motor skills), and we had some big blowups over it. She is *very* intense, and her teacher seemed not to be able to handle it. There were a number of screaming crying carrying on meltdowns over minor issues, mostly someone else taking her turn or her place in line or whatever. We seem to have those settled down now, but I still think that she's not participating and learning in class much. The writing load is pretty demanding - if your kids don't know how to type yet, learning would be time well spent.
Oh, and I'll give you a tip for before school starts in the fall - they give the kids a math placement test on the first day of school, and they are then tracked in math for the year with no possibility of change. So make sure your kids are "up to date" with what they know of math before school starts. DD had forgotten how to "borrow" in subtraction, and I think she ended up in a lower level of math because of it. She's pretty bored with math. I noticed that she was getting problems wrong when her first week of math worksheets came home, and reminded her how to do it, which took exactly one reminder and she's been fine ever since, but she's in the math track she's in, full stop, end of story.
