Would you expect that a five year old coming to the end of Reception should be able to write all their letters correctly?

[SleepFreeZone]

I’m pretty shocked. My DS entered Reception very behind in certain areas, particularly writing as he had refused to do any mark making throughout his preschool time. Instead opting for building toys and play kitchens etc.

His recent report expected him to hit the government targets, which is much better than we thought he’d do. At one point we thought he had ASD but after an assessment they ruled that out. However I sat down with him today to finish a little craft project we’d been working on and realised he really couldn’t write certain letters at all.

He is writing some mirrored, but some just completely wrong. I’ve been so focused on getting his reading up to par I feel like I've totally dropped the writing ball. Do you think he’s going to really struggle come September once the workload jumps and they start doing a lot more table based activities? Should I be doing regular practice with him over the summer holidays? Is it worth trying to discuss it with his teachers so late in the academic year?

DD2's are shaped into recognisable letter shapes, usually the right way around, the formation strokes are somewhat OK (she's got a few she's got into a right arse about tit way of writing the letter that we need to work on). However they're sized generally starting writing size and going up to Hollywood sign size, the first couple of words are generally OK with letters coming one after the other in the intended order... then we get a bit of a letter pileup with them on top of each other before they detour off around the corner, up the edge of the page and often off onto the table. Lines on the paper are just there as a fashion statement to make the paper look interesting and bear no resemblance to where the letters end up whatsoever.

She does have dyspraxia though which fucks her parking letters correctly one after the other up no end.

DD1's writing went through a complete decline over the course of Reception (her school was not at all good and let her coast like nothing else and just amuse herself a lot of the year) and was shockingly bad by this point in the term (I was actually horrified by her writing when her work came home at the end of the term) and in Y1 it's taken a complete turnaround and it's now beautifully neat, somewhat joined (we're still at that phase where the eagerness to please and joins up needs reducing somewhat no DD1 you cannot join up full stops) and completely legible.