DS has a poor pencil grip and does not write his letters in the proper sequence such as he does it bottom up. Letters do not stay on the lines and he does not remember capitals or punctuation. Handwriting is sloppy without a lot of effort.
These can be symptoms of dysgraphia - when our dysgraphic ds was in 1st and 2nd grade his handwriting didn't look different enough than typically developing students for us to realize there was an issue, except that he was frustrated, didn't complete his work, rushed through work when he had to do it. The lack of capitals/punctuation etc was all thought to be age-related and developmentally on-track as there's a wide variety of "on-track" at that age. DS' 2nd grade teacher was convinced he had ADHD due to his behaviors in class, but the real issue was dysgraphia.
It's really tough to determine what's up when our children are so young - we also have a dd who had vision issues that impacted her academics but she was able to cope until she was in 2nd grade, and even then her teacher thought the issue was learning-related. At home we thought she had ADHD... turns out she'd had severe double-vision and tracking issues forever, but she thought everyone saw the same way, hence she never told us he was struggling with vision.
Best wishes,
polarbear
