Belle, your ds sounds a bit like my ds, who also just turned 5, has SPD and is still in speech therapy. As for OT for SPD, he's done for now - we did a short but intensive program at the Star Center last fall in combination with listening therapy. They strongly believe in doing OT for SPD in an intensive fashion (more than once per week). So my first thought would be to make sure you're getting the kind of OT he needs for sensory - I think it's not easy to find the right OT, who really knows what they're doing (as opposed to just "thinking" they know what they're doing; not just brushing, for example). It seems that slowly there are more OT places springing up that are well-versed in SPD than there used to be. Secondly, I would incorporate some sort of sensory diet if you haven't already done so. (uh, speaking of do as I say and not as I do LOL - I'm trying to do this. I also have a dd with SPD).

And as you indicate, it sounds like fine motor issues (as a component of SPD) were affecting his score. This is one reason I'm waiting on testing ds privately; I don't want to waste the money if I don't think the score will accurately represent his IQ (that, and the fact that we're not applying to any particular program at the moment - he's currently in what seems to be an excellent situation in a montessori school, and his teacher is very flexible in working with both his strengths and his weaknesses. he'll have the same teacher/classroom for K next year). But he's more than a grade level ahead in math from what his teacher tells me, indeed not far off from his 7 y.o. sister who is also 2E.

But what really, really, really jumps out at me from your post, and perhaps you've already investigated this angle since you do discuss vision processing, is the vision stuff. Has he been evaluated by a behavioral optometrist? http://www.covd.org/ We've had to go this route for DD7, and she's almost done with vision therapy, finally... It has helped tremendously. If he can't block out the other text on the page from what he's trying to read, he could easily have a problem with eye teaming like my dd, and fortunately that would be very fixable. The vision therapy was very hard for dd in the beginning - it took forever to get through the daily exercises - but then we stopped in order to have time for the intensive OT for SPD (which started out as 3x per week - we were pretty busy!), and when we re-started the vision therapy, the difference was huge - it was so much easier for dd to get through the vision exercises. The vision therapist was shocked. The OT had told us that by working on dd's vestibular and proprioceptive SPD issues, it would ultimately affect things like ocular motor control, but I found it hard to believe until I saw the results. Anyhow, from what you describe about your ds, it sounds like his eyes are indeed not focusing on the same point at the same time, only in a more extreme way than for my dd. (by the way, dd's vision issue was NOT picked up by the regular checkup at the pediatric opthamologist; but a few weeks after that appt, we did IQ testing and the testers commented that the way she did the block design indicated a vision issue.)

As for school services, I think you need to define for yourself what exactly it is that you want. The vast majority of school districts do not provide OT for SPD. My ds will be getting OT for fine motor/handwriting - we're in the middle of the IEP process right now - but that's such a narrow thing. The OT who services the school has been so helpful about recommending things to do at home, sensory diet, etc., to help his sensory issues in general as well as core body strength, which apparently will ultimately help with ds's fine motor issues. As for speech therapy, that's more of a cut and dried thing - we had a tough time with the eval process this past month (ds did not want to speak to the speech therapist who was trying to do the eval) and the special ed team was freaking out about so-called "social/emotional" issues that I don't believe he has (I think they were trying to pathologize his introversion, long story) but eventually he talked to her and he tested within normal limits on language so it's only articulation that needs work, which he'll be getting (duh, I could have told them that. but then they act all surprised.) And as for gifted programming, what are the choices? Our district has both pull out services (which IMO happens to be lame) and a full time gifted program, but neither starts until second grade, and neither seems well-suited for a 2E kid. I was flipping through the full time gifted program's handbook on line the other day and was rather surprised to see it written that it's only for one type of gifted kid, and has all kinds of stringent requirements for keeping achievement 2 grade levels ahead in all areas, etc. or else. (I know my kids are 2E so things are different, but even regular gifted kids can be asynchronous, geez). Our school district will offer special ed services, but to my knowledge there's nothing they really do for 2E kids. I did find a state document on 2E, but it also requires that the learning issue be an official Learning Disability under federal law, and I'm not sure whether my kids' learning issues would qualify; not that we've tried yet. Fortunately we're happy with the montessori situation for now - it's a public charter, so ds can get speech and OT services during the school day next year - but it's something I am constantly re-evaluating.

I think your gut feeling is probably right, that the conditions on the day of his testing on the SB5 were far less than ideal, and that the score is probably not accurate. Was the tester experienced at testing gifted kids? how about 2E kids? these are questions I would want to find out the answers to, before you do any further testing. And I think there's some kind of required time lag before you can do the same test again (a year). When we had our dd tested at the Gifted Development Center, they chose the WISC IV, but at the time I hadn't read enough about tests to ask why that was the particular one they wanted to use. Not surprisingly, there were differences between scores among sections; I suspect that's what they were looking for - they ended up calculating the GAI and I think they see the other sections (working memory and processing speed) as more diagnostic of learning issues. It was our first exposure to this new world of giftedness with learning issues, and so we learned an awful lot. But it sounds like you already know an awful lot. So your district has some kind of gifted programming that starts in K? And you were doing the testing for that purpose?

Obviously these are stream of consciousness thoughts. I'm sure I'll have to come back and edit this later.
smile