Thank you all - your responses are very helpful.
Polarbear, our son had much anxiety in grade one about not being able to complete work to the extent the other children could and the work he did was so rudimentary compared to what we saw at home. Other kids have begun commenting on how slow he is to finish his work, which I'm sure isn't helping either his self esteem or his social life. Our psychologist has said the multiple SD's btwn his PS score and the others could be characterized as a written output disorder, but none of us has considered a speech issue. Like your son, he's extremely verbal and he often sounds more like an adult than a child. I'll try some abstract reasoning questions on him to see how he responds. Thanks for the tip, I wouldn't have considered that.
We had the psych-ed done privately and do have the break downs. His overall WJ-III was 130 and his writing fluency was 106, while his writing samples score was 128. Story recall and understanding directions were the other low scores (100, 105 & 107). In the WISC-IV his scaled scores showed 8 for word reasoning, 8 for coding, 10 for picture completion, 11 for symbol search & 4 for cancellation. Everything else was 13-17.
When he does write, his writing is lovely - very precise (too precise, he's a perfectionist and slows himself down erasing anything that's not exact) and his spelling is excellent. I suspect it's more about his hand not being able to keep up with his thoughts, but I'll read up on dysgraphia to be sure. I can handle any diagnosis and would rather have one and an action plan than this piece meal, some teachers get him some don't approach!
Knute974, DeeDee & master of none, the specialized program is intended for LD's like dyslexia and costs considerably more than the standard tuition at the school. If I thought it were the answer I'd give up whatever I had to to pay for it in a heartbeat, but it really seems to put him into a box that doesn't fit him so that they have less work in the regular classroom. Which I am already paying for. In the program's defence, each child has a computer and the teachers work one on one with the students, so it is theoretically learner-centred. The kids join their grade for music & PE, but are separated for all academics.
The remedial writing class I agreed to has him relearning the basic sight words and vowel sounds that he has known for eons. (he's a very strong reader). And he still writes less and more painfully slowly than the other students, even though he is way ahead of them with phonetics and spelling. I worry that that will make him feel even worse about his abilities than if he were writing just as slowly but with regular content.
The psychologist recommended he dictate his work so that he can show what he really knows and start to feel successful in school, again. She said he should only be expected to write when writing is the point of the exercise. It is being done a bit, but really only for things like math tests. He's still expected to write a lot and is marked for knowledge on his written output. The psychologist also recommended that he use computers more, and that doesn't seem to be happening at all. DS has a fairly rigid personality and has apparently begun to respond by simply refusing to do some work. His report card just arrived and I'm quite sure it must be for someone else's child!!
Thank you all, I'm somewhat encouraged and much more informed!
