When my 11 year old son with motor dyspraxia and hypotonia was in kindergarten, he could print all the letters of the alphabet well enough that most people could make out what they were, but the letters looked very shaky and were all different sizes and he was very slow at writing. We told the teacher about the hypotonia, which is all we knew he had at the time, and she thought more practice coloring in the lines would fix the problem, which is one reason we decided to homeschool. He wasn't eligible for OT in our state because he was not failing.
A first grade teacher and mother of gifted boys looked at his writing and said "typical gifted boy" so my son never got to see an OT in school or anywhere else for his handwriting. The OT he saw for six sessions only worked with him on sensory issues.
When he homeschooled his first grade year, I had him continue to practice printing the way he had been taught in school and it just didn't seem to look any better or get any faster, in fact it seemed like the more he practiced, the worse it looked and he complained that his hands hurt. He often broke the pencil lead when he wrote. He couldn't get his thoughts on paper because the physical act of writing took so much out of him. We started using Handwriting without Tears his second year of homeschooling because so many people recommended it. He had worked really hard to learn to print the way he was already printing and didn't want to change. He took the HWT book and scratched out the word "out" making it look like Handwriting with Tears. I really couldn't tell that the printing book helped him that much.
If I had it to do all over again I would have switched to cursive at that point. It would have been easier for him because he was eager to learn cursive, but I thought he needed to stick with printing to get faster at that because that is what is friends were using. I had not yet figured out that my child needed to do what was best for him and not worry about what the other kids were doing.
I didn't let him start learning cursive until he was almost 9 and it did work better for him. He didn't have to worry about the spaces in between words or occasionally reversing letters or the sizes of the letters and his cursive was more legible than mine. He liked to point that out too. But as well as cursive worked for him, speed was still a problem. He still can't write fast enough to get his thoughts on paper and if he has to write very much, legibility decreases and I am talking about a few paragraphs, so he types. He still hates the physical act of writing so much that I still have to make him write in his journal and he tries to talk me into acting as his scribe.
He uses mechanical pencils because we got tired of constantly having to sharpen pencils and he learned to not press down on the pencil as hard.
He finally at age 11 has a dysgraphia diagnosis along with the dyspraxia.
