Hello all. I'm sorry I dropped out of the conversation so abruptly. I had hip arthroscopy a few weeks ago and it knocked me on my heinie for a lot longer than I expected. As way of an update, my son qualified for the gifted program in his district (solidly, he had several 99th percentile scores and nothing lower than a 94th percentile on the Cogat and IOWA). However, when I was looking at his istation results (this is a computerized reading program that the kids test on each month) and he has huge discrepancies between vocabulary, comprehension, etc and spelling, phonemic awareness and other things like that. His spelling in particular was in the 23rd percentile while vocabulary and comprehension are in the 99th. I sent a screenshot to a friend who is a reading specialist in an elementary school and she said it is indeed looking similar to dyslexia. She also mentioned that in most kids that she works with, dyslexia and attention issues tend to co-occur. There are only 2 weeks left in the school year so I don't think we'll be able to do any testing through the school district until next year. His teacher is going to meet with me sometime before the end of the school year and so we'll see what she suggests as well.
I appreciate so much everyone taking the time to reply and give information about your own experiences. I'll update as we actually take action and give information about what helps him. Right now the plan is to work over the summer on handwriting and spelling, probably with input from my friend. I'm still hemming and hawing about whether to try to do it myself (maybe using the curriculum people have suggested) or hire someone (some teachers from his school tutor over the summer, there are specialized handwriting tutoring centers, etc).
