I should preface my reply with a reminder that I’m not living in the US so differences in policies may impact the relevance of my comments to your situation.
In the earlier years of primary, a lot of classroom activities were fairly seamlessly adapted for DS - for example whilst the rest of his class worked on multiplication sheets, with the teacher’s permission, DS completed these same worksheets in Roman numerals, binary, other existing number base systems and even in number base systems he invented by creating his own symbols for double digit numbers in our Hindu Arabic decimal system. The only hitch to this is that not all primary teachers are comfortable marking this sort of work, yet I think it’s good to always get feedback, so my son brought his worksheets home for me to mark - would your son have someone who can do this for him?
For spelling and grammar exercises, instead of using the curriculum words (there were three sets of different levels of difficulty so the rest of the class weren’t working on the same set anyway), he could choose his own set of (usually very obscure) words from the dictionary to complete the same exercises as his classmates (writing definitions, using each word in an appropriate sentence, exploring the origin of each word). He also reflected on the subtle differences between synonyms. In this way, at a passing glance, a visitor to the classroom would not have been able to tell that DS’s activities were differentiated and yet he was enjoying extending himself in many creative ways (like your son).
DS was also allowed time on classroom computers to research topics of interest. The teacher had a policy that anyone who finished all their work could access these computers so it didn’t look like there was any favouritism for DS, but in reality, most of his classmates didn’t complete their work within allocated times.
DS also managed to find a lot of ways to occupy his thoughts without being disruptive. At one time, from his own internet reading, he was quite interested in the theory that people with left or right hemispheric dominance might have qualitative differences in their thoughts, so he studied each classmate very carefully (upper & lower limbs as well as eye movements during thought) and correlated all of these findings with the content of their speech presentations. Most people probably would have just thought he was being ‘a good listener’ to his classmates’ presentations and not known that he was actually conducting his own higher observational research. He believed he figured out which kids were naturally right handed and which were naturally left handed but had switched, but never found the prize of his quest - the true bi-hemispheric individual which Einstein was purported to be. As I said, your DS reminds me of mine - I hope you find ways to help yours navigate through your system.
