When I have enough time and energy, I can normally get DS excited about most any topic.
One thing you might contemplate here... are you getting your ds excited... or is whatever you're doing giving him enough clues/support/scaffolding that he's *able* to get started?
pb
I think engaging in conversation about a topic gets him going, intellectually. He likes to converse. Also, when we do this, he normally is standing, throwing a ball back and forth against the wall, moving and being funny. I'm not sure if that is DS managing anxiety, or DS trying to use his own personal activation strategies.
He sounds a lot like my ds - my ds' SLP referred to the engaging in conversation as a "jump start" to get his thoughts flowing out. DS describes it (for him) as not an issue of having too many thoughts to decide between, but literally "having nothing" in terms of thoughts, but engaging in conversation with another person helps get his brain in "thought" motion. Once his SLP discovered that connection, she worked on finding ways for him to "jump start" in the classroom. Her first suggestion was to talk it over with a teacher or fellow student, and if that option wasn't available she discovered that just moving his mouth helped - so she had him chew on gum or a granola bar. She also suggested he get up and move around - walk to the bathroom and back if walking around in the classroom wasn't an option. At home he would always prefer to be up and moving around or playing with clay or something while we brainstormed writing topics.
I don't know if these are things your ds necessarily "needs" but they are things that help my ds (who needs them) and are also widely used by the *adults* with no challenges that I know.... so they might be things that would help your ds' writing process flow quicker... just fyi: speech to text and keyboarding with word-prediction.
Anyway, fwiw, when my ds was initially evaluated by an SLP he didn't have *low* scores on the CELF (widely-used speech assessment), but he had uneven scores, some extremely high, others around average, similar to the unevenness on his WISC. He was diagnosed with an expressive language challenge based on the discrepancy in scores. Speech therapy really did help a ton.
Best wishes,
polarbear
