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He was on a few different medications but my breaking point was the day that I had to physically restrain him because he was trying to hit me. He is normally a happy child. He can be very emotional though, especially when he is tired. I don't know if I would say that he has anxiety per se, but he does worry about things that 8 year olds shouldn't think about..like me getting old, passing away, war, the end of the world, etc. It's also usually when he is tired and emotional that he thinks about those types of things.
Anyway, I decided that even if I had to tell him to sit down/sit still/focus on the task at hand hundreds of times a day, I'd rather do that then change who he is as a person.

Re the math facts - at 8 years old, he might simply not be developmentally ready to memorize them, even if he's profoundly gifted. Math facts are conquered at different ages for different kids, and for some kids they don't come until as late as 4th/5th grade. However - it sounds like your ds does know his math facts because you can quiz him verbally and he knows them. So you have to look at what's the difference when he's tested at school - and I'm guessing the difference is he's using handwriting to answer on the timed tests. So chances are it's not knowledge of the facts that's holding him up, it's handwriting.

So what can you do about that, if it's handwriting? You can ask that he be tested by responding orally in the classroom. You might not get that unless your ds has an IEP or 504 with accommodations, but you can at least ask that it happen at least once so the teacher can see the difference in his scores.

The other thing you should do is to try to see if you see handwriting holding him up anywhere else in his academics. Are any of the other WJ-III frequency tests low scores relative to the others? Does your ds resist or procrastinate on other types of homework that require handwriting?

All of this may be totally irrelevant for your ds, so ignore it if if doesn't sound applicable! OTOH, if any of it sounds familiar, fwiw, my ds has a challenge with handwriting (dysgraphia), and none of us recognized it until he was evaluated by a neuropsych in 2nd grade. We didn't seek out the neuropsych because we were worried about handwriting, but instead we were referred to a neuropsych because our ds' teacher was convinced he had ADHD, and we were worried because he was displaying signs of sky-high anxiety. What we have learned since that time is that he doesn't have ADHD and although he is a person who reacts to stress with anxiety, when he is given accommodations for his challenges (handwriting and expressive language) the anxiety disappears - it was completely secondary to what the real issue was.

That doesn't mean your ds has a handwriting challenge, but I just mention it because a neuropsych eval was key for us in understanding what was really going on at school for our ds. Up until the point his anxiety started ramping up at school, all we saw as parents was our son, whom we knew was extremely bright from his verbal conversations at home, was being held back in math because he wasn't writing down 20 (or something) simple math facts correctly in 2 minutes. Which was of course was beyond puzzling to us since we knew he knew those facts... but we never bothered asking him to show us with handwriting, we were just asking him to answer verbally when we quizzed him. For everything else, he was compensating which he could do simply because he was so smart. Eventually the handwriting demands became so high in other areas that he wasn't able to compensate, and all of that started coming together in 2nd grade.

Best wishes,

polarbear

He has some of the worst handwriting. I can tell him over and over to write neater and more legible but it really does no good because it always looks like a big jumbled mess when he is done with it. I can read it because he is my kid but sometimes I even have trouble. He loathes Mondays and Tuesdays homework sessions because that is when his handwriting is required the most. Actually, on the parent questionnaire, for the testing, they asked what his least favorite subjects were and my response was "math and handwriting".
I hope this doesn't sound bad, but it is kind of comforting to know that my kid is not the only one who struggles with these kinds of things.

I have the same problem.

It is kind of embarrassing when the law partner asks you what you wrote on the document when you are marking it up and you say "I'm not sure. My handwriting is kind of hard to read."

I can generally decipher what I was trying to say, though, so it's usually all good. Sometimes I have to guess, but I'm generally pretty good at reading my own writing.

I have the same problem as well! My handwriting is generally atrocious, because I'm usually trying to jot something down as quickly as possible. If I took the time to be neat, I could be.

My son skipped 1st grade, and he was already at the low end of the class for handwriting skills before the skip. His 2nd grade teacher would write things on his papers like, "I needed to get my 3D glasses out to read this." But he was lucky in that the teachers didn't press, they just said it would eventually come. And it did. My DS is now in 4th grade and his handwriting is legible. It's not the neatest in the class, but you can read it. His cursive is much better than his printing, probably because his pencil doesn't leave the page so much. We had worried about dysgraphia earlier, but I think it was more of a developmental thing for our kiddo (just turned 9).

Same here with DS 7, he cannot do those timed math tests at all - it's like the rest of the timer makes it so much worse. Fortunately his teacher recognizes this and doesn't time him or doesn't hassle him about not completing the page. And we talk to him about the importance of being right not fast - fast and wrong is not useful. Although he writes his numbers much better than his letters - and he is only a year removed from flipping all this numbers and other problems that seemed very concerned. He grew out of some and some are still there.

DeHe

This sounds so much like potential dysgraphia. Does he have irregular spacing, challenges with spelling while writing (not necessarily spelling tests), does his pencil grip look odd? Does he bend around strangely or get close to his paper while writing? Does he rub his wrist or his hands while he's working on a written assignment?

If he has *any* of that going on, I'd get a referral for a neuropscyh exam. Dysgraphia is really easily accommodated at school, but if it's left undiagnosed it can cause some real blows to self-esteem, especially with HG kids as they watch other students develop much better handwriting. There is also the potential that teachers won't realize your ds *is* smart simply because they might judge him based on his handwriting ability. Most importantly, if it is dysgraphia, the effort required for the student to think through how to form a letter each time he writes it takes up all the working memory which other students have free to use to focus on punctuation *and* getting their complete thoughts out on paper.

You might want to try letting him use a keyboard at home for homework for awhile and seeing if he likes that better. Another thing you might want to do is time how long it takes him to write his alphabet, upper and lower case, from memory. Measure the letters per minute when he's done - you can google "letters per minute + 2nd grade level" (or whatever grade level) and find general ranges for each grade level. Does his speed seem to be slow? Also look and see if he's reversing or not getting each of his letters correct.

polarbear

Wow..this is really eye opening.
Spacing while writing is a BIG issue with him. Here is a little sample of some of what he does when he writes sentences: "Thecat inthehat." or "The c at in thehat." or "Th e cat in the h at." He also does this when writing his spelling words. Just last week he wrote an entire set of words, three times in a row, with the first letter spaced about an index finger away from the rest of the word. He does write some letters backwards from time to time too. Mainly b,d,q,and p. It's not an occurrence that happens all the time though. My mother actually asked us a few months ago if he was dyslexic and then informed me that she was diagnosed as dyslexic as a child. I was under the assumption that if a child was dyslexic then they would read things backwards and write numbers and letters backwards all the time. I do catch myself quite a bit reading a series of numbers out of order or mixing them up but I never really thought much about it and I don't think its a big deal.
I have not noticed him bending in weird positions while writing but that may be because he never sits correctly in his chair to begin with. I have also never noticed him rubbing his wrists. He does hold his pencil differently than I do though.
He has a really hard time keeping his words and letter on the lines of his paper too. Sometimes his sentence ends up on the line below the one he was writing on to begin with. Also, when writing spelling words in column form, he slants them down the side of his paper until he is starting the words in the middle of the paper.
Aside from the Mad Minute Math tests, handwriting has been one of my biggest challenges with him.

What exactly is a neuropscyh exam?

My son can verbally spell things very well but when he writes them out he butchers words. Even if the test he is doing has a word bank at the top of the page, he misspells the words. Up until last night I thought he was just being lazy.

Reading is his best subject. He has timed reading tests and does very well on them, reading something like 120 (give or take) words per minute. He aces thoses tests every week, but maybe he can do those types of timed tests because it doesn't require him to write anything down....

ok...are we talking about the same child here?!

I have been told by others that he speaks like an adult..
He likes to pronounce every single syllable, especially when he is trying to get his point across. He puts a ton of emphasis on the last letter/sound of words. This happens most often with words that end with a g, t, s, d or r sound. There have been some words that he pronounces wrong or differently. Of course when I try to correct him he tells me "I can say it how ever I want to." He is the kind of kid that likes to make up his own rules to everything. He doesn't deal very well with being told what to do.