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I second the recommendation of cursive. My daughter's school teaches cursive, and her third grade teacher admitted that when she started at the school she was skeptical about its utility, but she has found that it is a great reset for kids who were/are perceived as having bad standard handwriting.

But above all, I wouldn't let this keep you up at night - my kid sounds academically similar to yours, and her spelling is TERRIBLE. I think it comes from a similar place of wanting to get her ideas onto paper very quickly. I spent a little time worrying about it, but realized that with the prolific spell checks available, it just isn't as important as it once was. Same goes for handwriting.

Coming at this from the perspective of a teacher, I would ask, is there something else going on fine motor or language-wise that would have a bigger impact, long term? Like, does she have issues with cutting with scissors, buttoning, etc? Or other issues with decoding that would be related to spelling? If not, then I agree with PP's that leaning into typing and spell check, or speech-to-text even, will help with a lot of that in the long term. Especially if they haven't had a lot of direct spelling instruction, it makes sense that it's lagging behind her decoding skills, even if we think it should be related. My third grader, who also reads above grade level (though just a little), got a good amount of phonics instruction last year but has a hard time using that to spell new words. And this year is such a reset, even though I think his school did pretty well with remote learning. At the start of the year, he guessed that "take" might be spelled "taic" based on what he knows phonetically.

I also wanted to add that just because a kid can have better handwriting when they slow down, that doesn't mean that actually everything is fine. It might be that it takes so much extra concentration and physical effort to write more clearly that she has less energy to focus on the content. Or writing just becomes exhausting in general. They do make paper with guidelines for letter and word spacing, if you want something to practice with.

We didn’t do it for this specific reason, but my oldest took a cursive class on outschool and I think it was pretty useful! All they do to “teach” it at school is send home workbooks for cursive but a live teacher was better. We did it during the summer - about 10 classes and they had practice work in between but not a ton. I wanted her to learn but she also just loves how fancy it looks

@meadow: Yes, as a college instructor who has to grade hundreds of exams - a combination of writing and math - I think I have an unusually high value for legible handwriting. Math would be cumbersome to type out for an exam in latex and hence is almost always done by hand. We can't have students type their essays either on laptops if it is closed book b/c cheating. In some jobs, even if done with tech, white boarding is a central part of brainstorming meetings... There's also just something nice about, i.e. being able to write a legible handwritten thank you note. I think working towards legible - with reasonable spelling - is very worth it, without needing to strive for perfection...

@Mrs. Carrot: So my son did OT when he was 4-5 for more broad motor issues, and "graduated" about halfway through kindergarten. He still struggled with handwriting, so his school recommended an OT that specializes in writing—the OT comes to the (private) school once a week and works with a bunch of kids. I don't know if this is common, but if you're in the DC metro area, I can give you our OT's info!

@Mrs. Carrot: I actually asked a local mom group, and they gave a couple recommendations. In case it's helpful to look for the same sort of thing in your area, here is the tutor we use: https://www.littlelettersnyc.com/
I'm happy to ask her if she has any recommendations for the DC area when we see her on Monday!

I think a part of it could have to do with her desire to be better. You say yourself, she’s just trying to get it over and done with. I think somehow making it a game might help. My daughter (a leftie) had pretty bad printing and then this year, decided that she wanted it to be “pretty” and suddenly she had great printing. So I’d say your LO needs to want it for herself.

As an aside, for all the people saying writing isn’t necessary and everything will be typewritten, I think it’s too early in a kid’s life to write it off. I work in a pharmaceutical company and results of tests are written down. And legibility counts. If people can’t read what you wrote, then you can’t say that the drug you made is safe. I can’t believe I’m in the only industry where legibility is important and things are written by hand.

I teach on Outschool (but I teach and tutor phonics, so I promise this isn’t self-promotion). I’ve seen (and my kids have taken) some pretty awesome writing classes (both handwriting and content). It may be worth looking into, both group classes and tutoring are available. Let me know if you want any help finding good classes or qualified tutors!