Thanks, everyone, for all of the responses. It is very helpful.
His WMI and PSI were actually much lower (I don't have the assessment in my hand at the moment), though still in the average to above average range. I've read that this can be fairly typical of gifted children, however (he also has perfectionistic tendencies and this slows him down on some things). Apparently this can
sometimes lower your FSIQ but not always (though I don't understand why), and in his case it did not.
Some other things I've learned about him in the last few days:
- He has noticed that he is the slowest writer in his class. We experimented and he agreed to write out the alphabet from memory (both capital and lower case letters) under a stopwatch. It took him over 5 minutes to complete (though his letters came out fine... a little squished to the right margin as he was running out of room, but nothing reversed or anything like that).
- When he reads aloud (which he seems to enjoy), I've noticed that he will often skip words, substitute larger words he doesn't recognize for words that begin with the same letter, and sometimes leave off the plural s.
- He tells me that he knows that spelling of the word he wants to write, but when he goes to write it, sometimes the complete wrong letters come out (for instance, he may spell 'you' as 'yow' and then will go back and erase the 'w').
- Though my spouse and my vision require glasses, his vision has been checked recently and it's been fine.
- He does seem to do much better with longer passages and worse with short, out-of-context phrases. Today, he and another kid his age were both attempting to read a sign that said 'Park Hours.' I could hear the other kid sounding out each letter of 'Hours.' My kid, however, stared at it for awhile, and then said, 'I think it says Hobson' (a lot of things are named Hobson near us, so it's a familiar with to him).
We're trying to get him to write a bit more to see if it's merely a matter of practice. He's really into nature right now, so we're having him keep a journal and write down some things he thinks about. So far, he has written down a few things, but he seems to prefer drawing pictures to writing phrases.
To put all of this in comparison, he composed a story for school a few weeks back that I took dictation for... and it was phenomenal for someone his age: really rich in description with a complex plot that centered around an advanced play on words. His story was ranked #1 for his class. It's good to know that, even if this isn't coming out when he writes, he is extraordinarily expressive.
