Thank you all so much. I feel like an army is behind me now as I prepare for the next meeting at school.
To answer a few of the questions I can remember - yes, we're addressing his OT outside of school as well as in school. Some skills that were impossible a couple of years ago (swimming) developed quickly this summer as he's matured a bit more. He's even considering joining the club's youth swim team next year where we took him for lessons.
The dysgraphia has a much broader reach in terms of challenges in my son that just the neuro-motor issues. He is a slow reader, doesn't retain a lot of what he reads, doesn't understand written instructions if they are multi-step, forgets assignments that are given orally between the time he hears them and goes to write them down in his planner, has had difficulty memorizing his times tables, makes a myriad of computational errors in math, and is - on good days - an abysmal speller.
His strengths are in his recall knowledge of things he's listened to or watched in a video, his ability to extrapolate information out to broad and diverse ideas, a strong global understanding of how and why things work and drawing conclusions about how those interactions affect other things - sometimes related, sometimes not. He has a keen understanding of human behavior and a heightened, strong sense of humor based on those observations. He has a strong sense of right and wrong which he lives by - even when it means getting himself in trouble by confessing to someone in authority. He is a natural leader and has been since he started school, and he is very good at compensating or deflecting when he is confronted with something he cannot do. He has excellent pitch, can recreate music after he hears it, composes his own songs, and harangues his family into performing in theatrical productions which he creates, adds the music, and directs - usually in our living room over the span of summer break. He won second place last year in the state fair Lego competition and shoots and edits his own movies, mostly humorous mockumentaries.
The psychologist who tested him a few years ago had attended elementary school with someone who is now one of today's most famous movie producers. He told me that he'd never come across someone who reminded him more of what that producer was like back in elementary school.
And because I see these amazing strengths - and see them often masked by things he struggles with - I worry more about how to help him successfully navigate the school system to get what he needs to develop his strengths and and strengthen his weaknesses so that he can live up to the potential he has once he is an adult.
