You described my son when he was in K, and he does have dyslexia and dysgraphia.
The teachers convinced me to wait to evaluate and I did, until the beginning of 2nd grade! At that point, the 2nd grade teacher told me a new story-- that some boys just "click" a little later and I would see him take off in March of his 2nd grade year.
I wish I had followed my mom gut instead of the teachers' advice. Problem is he has an extremely advanced PG brother and the teachers all said I had no idea what typical was. (True.) But I think they just thought he was slow and I knew he wasn't. The school wouldn't evaluate him because he was still within the range of normal.
I had him evaluated at our Children's Hospital and the tester told me she could tell from his writing sample before she even met him that he was dyslexic. (Why couldn't the teachers?!!) Yes, they can diagnose it in K.
My advice is to not wait for an evaluation. It took 4 years for my son to recover from his feelings of inadequacy and frustration in school. If we had had him tutored in K, instead of starting in 2nd grade when he felt stupid, it would have been a blessing.
He's doing really well now in 6th grade-- dyslexia's not a huge issue anymore, but dysgraphia always will be-- and it's been a long road to recovery. He decided in 2nd grade that he hates to read, and I'm not sure he'll ever change his mind, even though he just took a reading test and he's in the 80th percentile for his age. I think earlier intervention could have prevented that.
One question to ask the teachers telling you to hold off on requesting an evaluation-- what experience do they have with children who have dyslexia in K? If they say they don't have much experience, ignore them.
I think Yale has the most informative website about dyslexia.
http://www.dyslexia.yale.edu/ (I just went to the web site and I remember that one reason I was willing to wait on a diagnosis is that my son didn't have the language problems described on the site. He had an amazing vocabulary, talked early and knew he letters by age 2. But he just couldn't make the connection from letters to words without direct intervention.)
