Thanks, everybody! I have been so busy I didn't get back here to check back, but I really appreciate a bunch of perspectives.
For instance, is this happening when the students are being asked to free-write? If so, is he stopping and not moving forward, or is he finding a synonym and using it? Is the teacher going batty because he's asking her constantly how to spell words, or because he's not doing work?
At first he was balking and stopping, but she reported that he's now onto synonyms. It seemed like a good idea on his part, honestly...
He also struggled with spelling as we believe he is a whole-word reader and didn't rely on phonics to read which made spelling difficult. While he couldn't spell a word correctly, once he saw it written down he would know immediately if it was incorrect - but didn't know how to fix it- and his perfectionism caused him to be extremely upset about it. His writing turned into four words sentences using very simple vocabulary so he didn't get things wrong.
YES YES YES to all of this. He is exceptionally visual-spatial (WPPSI VSI >99.9%) and he can read many, many more words than his actual phonics education would predict. He almost always knows when something's wrong, and he's gotten every-so-slightly-more tolerant of writing down "wrong" words as the year goes, but in general he seems to find writing "wrong" words very distasteful.
I've been trying to do some additional phonics at home but have been struggling to find a good curriculum. This seemed like a good idea earlier in the year just to push up his confidence. Plus now he's in the reading group where they're working on "comprehension" and not phonics, so it seems whatever phonics he hasn't learned yet might be skipped entirely if we don't do it ourselves.
