Thanks everyone. He is feeling better about it now and wants to try again next year. There was an article in the paper the next day about the spelling bee. It didn't say much about the Pee Wee level (up to 4th grade) that my son competed in, but the boy who won the older kid's bee (the one that goes on to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.) won after spelling the word "ambrosial" in the 8th round. This boy said he knew all of the words he got, but didn't know some of the words the other kids had to spell, so my son realizes that some of it is luck too. I asked my son to spell the word "ambrosial" and he was able to spell it correctly and said he was suprised that such an easy word would be on the older kid's word lists. It also helped when he learned that the second-place winner was a 5th grader. When I told him that she would probably be there again next year, he just laughed and said "Competition, baby!"
So I guess he is not permanently emotionally scarred from the experience. He thinks he experienced "stage fright" and he needs to work on staying calm.
We are hoping that sensory integration therapy will help with learning to stay calm and focused during something like this. He was so excited before the spelling bee that he was shaking his hands a lot as if he were trying to shake out the nervous energy and skipping down the hall instead of walking calmly like the other kids. On stage, while sitting on the front row waiting for his turn, he just tapped his feet a lot. I did talk to his occupational therapist about this today. She said he could try doing push-ups against a wall out in the hall. My son said he thought people would think he was kind of strange if they saw him doing this and I agree. I don't know what would be a good way to get rid of this "excess energy" in public.
Speaking of occupational therapy, I finally got a written report on the results of his visual-motor and visual processing skills. When he was tested over two years ago, his visual motor integration was very low but visual perceptual was higher than average. This time visual motor integration was still low and the visual perceptual was average to well above average except for one thing that makes no sense at all. This time his visual memory scored below average! Talk about a quirky kid. He was identifying letters and numbers before age 2 and reading at 2 1/2 without being taught and tested grade levels ahead in reading and comprehension at age 7 and he can pick out misspelled words easily and I have seen absolutely no evidence of any kind of problem with visual memory. He is one of the first in his acting class with kids up to age 19 to memorize script and learned to spell thousands of new words in a matter of months, yet there it is on test results that he suddenly has a problem with visual memory. The report also mentions that he was obviously anxious throughout the assessment so maybe that had something to do with it.
I talked to the OT about this and she said she thought it had something to do with the sensory integration problems and she told me about someone she worked with that had to go running every morning to get his brain working properly.
