ps - deacongirl - thanks for the link to the Bird by Bird book - it looks great, and I've ordered a copy for myself and my ds to look at. The one thing I'd caution bluemagic is - my ds will most likely benefit from reading the book now, but that's after years of speech therapy. I don't know if your ds has an expressive language challenge or not, but for kids who do (like my ds) it's really key to understand what piece of expressive language skills is the roadblock before putting a big chunk of "how to attack _(fill in the blank)_" in front of them and expecting anything to come of it. The root of my ds' issue was actually generating thoughts - perhaps it's an organizational thing, it's not easy to explain, but the very first step in the writing process was a total road-block for him... and that was rooted in an actual LD, not in perfectionism. Had we tried tips aimed at getting past perfectionism at the beginning of remediation, it wouldn't have helped and would most likely have frustrated him to beyond the edge of any nearby cliff. This is somewhat what happened to him in school - his teachers made assumptions about the reasons that he wasn't producing writing. They also made very reasonable attempts to help him through his writing blocks based on their assumptions, but the assumptions weren't correct so they not only didn't result in any improvements in writing, they just led to extreme anxiety in my ds. Getting the SLP eval and seeing where the root of the problem was, then spending time working on that, was what led to actual improvement.
Best wishes,
polarbear
I have gone through getting a diagnosis for my daughter so I do agree it's probably best to see how eval turns out. It's just frustrating right now. Part of it's he doesn't care for poetry, particularly the selection of poems that he is being required to read. Most of them are about being a teenager from an adults perspective and feel to him like they are trying to tell him what to feel.
We have 7 more weeks of the school year, so I don't think this will help much for this years classes. But I am hoping we can talk about teacher selection for next year. Teacher selection makes a huge difference with DS.
It's hard because many teachers and adults who don't know him well see it as defiance. That I'm not being hard enough on him and if he was just motivated enough, or didn't spend as much time on computer games he would buckle down and get it done. But if you know him and work with it's obvious he isn't trying to be defiant.
