hnz1979, I am coming back to this a bit late but fwiw - here are a few thoughts for you:
Thanks everyone.
The school is doing IQ testing based on the extremely low scores he got from our psych. His overall IQ scored at 82, with a very low processing score. The principal was very disturbed by this. She said at minimum Zach should be at 100. (She feels he is highly intelligent.) Especially since he is excelling at reading and was formerly in one of the higher functioning class rooms and doing well academically. They will be doing observations also. Everyone that knows our ds comments about how bright he is. Teachers that know our ds say no way is that IQ score correct.
I'm so glad your school is willing to look further and do additional testing - it sounds like his teachers and school staff really care, and that's wonderful!
I do think he has attention issues. Our biggest hurdle is that ds thinks he knows everything so it's hard to explain school work because of battles.
This happened with my younger 2e dd (still does). The "knowing everything" (for her) was a combo of both self-confidence in a bit of a twisted way (shd couldn't see that other people might have equally valid ideas) *and* insecurity that she might not know something correctly - and that part (jmo) seemed to be driven by her feverishly attempting to not let the world know she was struggling with a challenge.
There could be some working memory issues, but it's hard to tease out.
Your ds is in school, but he's still very young. It really *is* difficult to tease out challenges and what's up when our children are so young. I realize this doesn't sound very helpful, but I wanted to reassure you that you're doing all the "right" things, and that as time goes by and you collect more data through observing, testing, talking to your ds etc - the issues will start to become clearer. It's a journey, not a one-stop-get-the-answer-and-move-on thing, but you will get to a place where what you are seeing now will make sense.
His handwriting skills are poor. He is just learning to write numbers but had 20 minutes of common core math last night.
My first thought here is - of course his handwriting skills are poor! He's 5! I am surprised that any school would send home 20 minutes worth of math homework for a 5 year old - but... maybe the assignment wasn't supposed to last 20 minutes? His processing speed score was really low on his first round of ability testing (per your note above).. which might mean he's got a challenge impacting handwriting, and that in turn makes an assignment like this particularly frustrating and/or time consuming. Have you tried scribing for him at home? I would *not* be the slightest bit worried about either not having him do the homework, cutting it off at 10 minutes (which is what our district guidelines are for homework *maximum time* - 10 minutes per grade level), or scribing for him. In fact, I would be sure to try scribing based on what you've said about his handwriting issues just to see if there is a significant difference in either time spent or frustration with his work etc.
Oops... I have more to say but have to go! More later
Hang in there,
polarbear
