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Your DS sounds similar to our DS7, although our DS's WPPSI score is lower, in the MG range, and ours is super active but is able to sit down and focus when he needs to. Our DS is in 1st grade, and we are in CO too.

Since you asked for others' experiences, I'll provide ours, since I think our kiddos sound similar. Reading has been a bit of a struggle for DS. Although he's performing advanced for his grade, he is way behind in reading compared to the rest of his skills. We just had him evaluated over Christmas break for dyslexia. Turns out it's not dyslexia, but the slower processing speed, which his WPPSI testing revealed a couple of years ago. Before this year, I thought he just didn't want to put the effort into reading, but over the first two months of first grade, it became clear to us that something larger was going on.

His slower processing speed results in pretty average written/testing performance in school, and we are just starting to work with his teacher to get a plan in place to remove time limits for him. It's not a learning disability, but it does affect his performance in school. Without our WPPSI testing that showed the slower speed, and the recent evaluation that explains its effects on his reading and written output, his teacher thought he just wasn't putting forth the effort - she knew he was more capable than his written output showed.

I wouldn't say our DS is academic at all. The only reading he wants to do is science topics, and he'd prefer we read to him - reading is tiring for him. He goes up a grade for math, and loves it, but he still has zero desire to do math homework at home. He'd rather talk about math conceptually and get in bed with a calculator. Homework often devolves into a parent-nagging-child situation because he simply cannot focus after a full day of focusing in school. He is high energy and is happiest when running, biking, or swimming.

But his interest in complex science topics, his analytical skills, and the adult-like conversations we have show, to us, that he is a gifted kiddo, despite his pretty average written/testing performance in school. I don't know if you have those kinds of conversations at home with your DS, or if your DS tests things out through his activities? That to me is where the essence of our DS's giftedness lies. He experiments with centrifugal force when he goes down the playground slide. He experiments with friction when he skids his bike. He does these things and tells us later what he was doing. We have conversations about how big is a googleplex in the context of all the atoms in the universe. Where do our souls go when we die. He corrects me about which forces cause which kinds of movement. None of them are "academic" - we have not never been able to get him excited about workbooks of any kind - but they're beyond the conceptual abilities of most first graders.

I guess I share all this because none of it really results in anything amazing at school, except that he goes up a grade for math. If we hadn't pushed for him to accelerate, his teachers would not have done it on their own. In my mind, for kiddos like this, a school like RMSEL or Odyssey (which we did not get into, didn't even know about them till he was in K) would be the best kind of learning experience because they engage kids' kinesthetic and experiential learning sides. What we've done is take what he loves and focus on it outside of school. Finding other peers who have similar interests has been helpful (but difficult). We take them to DMNS or on hikes and let them learn that way, while moving and interacting.