Thank you SO much to everyone who replied - you have no idea how nice it is has been to find this board and read SO many posts that have been on same topics that I have been wanting help in! So I apologize for rambling posts!

Since we know we will not be able to retake the SB until next year, several people have suggested taking the WPPSI since this one seems to be the one that our county prefers anyways. I think I will go into this with a different outlook - instead of driving him several hours to a location and then expecting him to still be focused on a test, we found someone locally. We will go in for many "hi" visits where my son can walk through the office and say hi to the psychologist well before any testing is done so he can become more comfortable with the setting and we will discuss options about breaking up the testing time so that hopefully we can get an accurate look.

The thing I think is most frustrating is that when my son is in a comfortable setting sensory wise - he is this amazing little boy who just can't seem to get enough of wanting to know everything about everything. He is the child that I have listened to running around the playground yelling at his friends to look up and see the cumulionumbus clouds because he saw on the weather channel that morning that a front was moving through and wouldn't it be cool if a super cell formed. Last week he came home with a drawing that to anyone else looked like a bunch of different colored lines all on top of each other...when I asked him what it was, he explained to me that he did it in the art center and it was a picture of the layers of the earth and he pointed out and told me the names of the crust, the mantle and the core. Last year he came home with a picture he had drawn showing his idea of what the continents might have looked like if they were on different plates and had drifted in different directions (he is in love with plate tectonics). His last year OT told us that she was just blown away by him with his abilities (along with some others that have worked with him)- but he was SO at peace with her and in her class setting where we brought him for services. He is a night and day child when he is out of his sensory comfort zone. If his sensory needs are not being met, he is still way ahead of his classmates but his patience level drops and he gets frustrated more. When his sensory needs are being met he is amazing. Take at home - he just turned 5, when he was about 4.5 he started watching the really cool show CyberChase and became fascinated with the show that talked about negative numbers and he began to set up his own games that involve negatives..he drew a chalk number line that went down our street, that went from 20 to negative 20 and then he rode his bike/scooter up and down the number line yelling out answers to his own math problems he came up with. He is in love with weather and storm chasing and he covers his whole playroom floor with block buildings and then creates his own "tornados" as they destroy the buildings and then using his ten zillion charts he has all over his walls (his playroom looks like a science lab with the periodic table, weather formation graphs, in depth charts of the solar system...) to help him determine the wind speeds of each "tornado" and charts what scale it was on the fujita scale. He was for some reason, totally fascinated with the story of the Titanic when he was 4 - he built an entire scenario in our living room out of legos of the titanic, the docking locations in Europe and it's planned final destination in America, the Carpethia, the iceburg and then using his maps, tried to grid out on the floor the exact striking point of the Titanic and the iceburg and then reinacted the whole scene including using a chart from a Titanic book that showed one of the final SOS messages taped out in Morse Code which he tried to duplicate by banging 2 sticks together...when he was 4! Kind of gave us an idea that we were dealing with something a little different here :-) This is him on a daily basis! These actions along with many, many more have lead a lot of people to believe that his SB score was just not accurate.

As a K teacher, we knew from the start that with his numerous ear infections, that speech was going to be a problem so he started Speech Therapy at 2 and had an IEP with the school system for both Speech and OT at age 3. We got the Sensory Disorder diagnosed very early and he began private Sensory Based therapy at the same time...so he got both Public and private OT for the past 2 years and we are very happy that we were proactive in getting that started as soon as possible. The thing that makes me get upset is that sometimes when people meet him, they automatically think he was like locked up in his room since birth and we force feed this stuff to him...when the complete opposite is true - he taught himself the numbers and letters/sounds/reading...if he asked us questions, we would help him find the answers, I remember him wanting to get on and explore websites on the computer when he was 3 - we literally had word cards with his favorite words/topics written on them - he would go to the computer, pick what topic he wanted and then would pull up the Yahoo search engine himself, he knew exactly where to go and would type in the topic himself copying it off the word card and then would spend hours exploring solar system videos or model train videos...

There are two main reasons behind testing him...one is because we are very concerned about his placement next year for Kindergarten. When a fellow K teacher friend of mine gave him the required end of the year K assessments for my county about 5 months ago (out of curiousity)and the DIBELS literacy assessment he scored off the charts - we didn't go as far as the DIBELS test allowed but where we stopped, it was showing him in mid second grade reading levels and this was when he was just over 4.5 yrs old. He is SO into math, and Math is not my strong point and he kept asking for new activities in math so, several months ago, we took him to a recommended tutoring center who gave him an assessment to see a starting point for him - he came up showing that he had mastered many 2nd and 3rd grade math concepts and they were just amazed at how excited he was about doing more math "games"....but their tutoring costs were insane so we didn't go down that street. My biggest fear is that because he is a perfectionist, he is not a self-motivated learner unless it is in an area that he is in love with, and he has his sensory disorder...everyone who knows him has stated that if he is placed in a regular K classroom he will become a basket case. How do you handle a kid who is reading chapter books, wants to learn how to make his own measurement scale to measure earthquakes and volcanic eruptions but tell him oh, sorry honey, today you have to complete these workbook pages and sing the alphabet song in circle time? We were told that when he entered K next year, he would be assessed around Nov. time and then we would need to wait for scheduling to do the whole IEP/team meeting and that the ball would not get rolling on any plan of action until at least Feb. of his K year. I have been in the education system for years and I know just how slow the whole process is. But, we were told that if we came in armed with our own private test scores that there would be a very likely chance that he would qualify for one of the TK-1 programs in the county which has much smaller class sizes (perfect for his sensory issues) and that the teachers in this program have much more flexibility with making individualized instruction in order to keep the kids challenged...and that he might have the chance to move right into the classroom as soon as school started. The other reason for looking at testing is that we are really wanting to get an honest, accurate look at his strengths and weaknesses - we think he is a very visual-spatial learner who may also have some visual issues and if we have a grasp on this now, we can work together with who ever his teacher is next year to start out from the gate with some ideas to help him succeed.

Right now he is in a Montessori preschool where he has attended since he was 2...we are in a very much retired area of the state so we are limited on school choices and this is one of the best Montessori schools we have been able to find....and we have been considering him staying there for next year as he would be the only K student in his classroom. His 2-3 yr old class teacher was amazing with him and he adored her and vice versa - she followed his sensory diet like the holy grail and she never had any issues with him at all - he was focused, happy, kept her busy with trying to keep him enriched! ...when he moved up into the montessori 3-5 year old class things have been very bumpy. His teacher is very wishy washy and some days she seems to get him and some days she has no clue. It took her a long time to get on board with his sensory issues and I still think she believes we are nuts. We have given her specific sensory diet activities to do with him daily and we have come to realize that she helps him with them when she remembers - which is not very often....he is not a behavior problem at school but he has the typical sensory issues with transition problems. With his spatial issues he tends to bang into everyone and everything and he is a very tall child (and the oldest - the next child down from him is a full year younger and the rest are all 3) so he has been kind of labeled as the "pain" by other children because they think he is doing it on purpose. His biggest problem is that he is bored silly out of his mind with his main teacher. She believes that he should not be allowed to explore new areas until he has completely mastered things such as being able to carry and hold his work tray without tripping, being able to sit perfectly still in his chair while doing a lesson,...things that frustrate us because why in the world would you hold a child back from learning if he has a disorder that affects his ability to properly carry a tray??? That is like telling a person in a wheelchair who has problems moving it around a room - oops - sorry you can't learn that lesson because you keep bumping into the tables? The assistant teacher is an angel and knows our son and she goes out of her way to make sure that his needs are met which causes some friction between her and the lead teacher. The lead is one of those teachers that believes that a child should not move on until all the steps are completed...so what if he knows all his numbers, he must complete lessons a,b,c, and d in the correct order, even if he already knows how to do them before he can move onto a new concept. My son has known his numbers since he was 2- he was counting well past 100, counting by 5, 10's by 3 yrs old and he is in love with math, patterns, and numbers...he is DYING to do the bead chain activities in his class- I met with his teacher today for conferences and I told her again (for like the 10th time) that he wants to do the bead chain activities and several people at the center believe he is beyond ready for it...her response was that she was really hoping to hold off on it until he was in Kindergarten because that was when she usually introduced it but we ended the meeting with that she would start him on the lessons next week. She said that she knew he was more than ready for the lessons but that if she allowed him to go do the "older" lessons that she would have to allow the other children to try them as well. She told him time and time again months ago, when he had completed a concept and he asked about going on to a new one - that that lesson was for the 5 year olds and since he wasn't 5, he wasn't ready for it. Which just burns me because that is SO against the whole Montessori approach...nothing is supposed to be split up into age groups but she has a whole section of the classroom (which all happens to be what my little guy is dying to get his hands on) and for weeks and weeks I kept hearing from him when he wasn't able to do something as perfectly as he had wanted to that "I can't do it because I am not 5 year old smart". I quickly put an end to that whole mess!

So we are stuck with trying to figure out what to do with next year. If we are able to get accurate test scores that can show all of the things that everyone keeps seeing then he could possibly qualify for the TK-1 program where he may be able to soar - or we could attempt to stay where we are at his Montessori school. So we are pulling our hair out at the moment :-) Thanks for letting me ramble - it is so good to get things out that many of my friends just don't understand!