This rings a bell. In my case, I had developed a large vocabulary (spoken and written) from rote memory - like mentioned above, I thought all words were sight words. In first grade I had trouble with writing and various aspects of phonological awareness, such as not being able to split words into syllables or syllables into letters, such that I was behind the kindergarten students (I was moved from a first grade class to a mostly-kindergarten class). My basic phonological awareness only caught up when I was roughly ten or eleven, when my dad found a copy of Hamlet, and there were still aspects of phonics that were a complete mystery to me in the sixth grade, despite having reading comprehension scores at the college level.
Incidentally, while I wasn't late to speak, I had unusual language mostly repeating phrases from TV, and when my dad gave me options for what kind of lunch meat, my delay in understanding the speech was such that I would just repeat back something he said (often the last thing) even when I didn't know what it was. After a few times of him telling me "You said you wanted X" after I started complaining I didn't get what I wanted, I learned to be less picky. My parents had no clue until WAY later that I had language difficulties apart from the syllable problems mentioned in one of the regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences, when in high school and I had developed the skills to communicate the problems I had processing language. So that is a time advantage you have.
Whether it's a learning disability or something else, it's definitely something to keep an eye on to make sure the school doesn't ignore it, or worse blame him for being lazy and choosing not to cooperate with the assignment because he's "obviously smarter than that". First grade was one of my least favorite school years for a reason, when days often culminated with my thinking I'm just lazy and stupid and crying, fighting with my parents. It's fairly likely that he'll get frustrated by the math in the classroom - at one point I walked out of the classroom after arguing with the teacher why I shouldn't have to show my work in adding two numbers every single time after I've demonstrated I understand the process and continue to get the right answers, but temperaments differ, and he may handle it better. Still, it's easier to learn to play nice with the system and remain interested in a subject when you get outside enrichment to actually learn things about the topic (in case he can't access gifted programming for math).
And while the rote memorization fo words can last long and be surprisingly effective, it does wear off more quickly than other systems - my spelling began to degrade between 8th and 10th grade, a few years after a huge word learning spike, the worst offenders being double consonant words like "obsess" (AKA obbsess and obssess and obsses) and "resurrect" (AKA ressurrect and ressurect), and the a/e words like "relevant". Those tirp everyone up at some point, though, and I did develop a significant amount of phonological awareness by the end of elementary school, so that's probably an important factor in maintaining spelling/vocab. The inefficient way of handling this data is probably also contributed to my deep, abiding hatred for rote memorization tasks in the classroom setting. So the resources can be more intense to get to a similar result, and learning phonological awareness early probably is a good initial investment to free up thinking space, instead of continually filling up the RAM to the max and causing language to crash or come close to it.
I would also second MumofTHree's recommendation (argh! another one!*) about learning spelling in a visual spatial way, although I am not familiar with those particular articles. I learned my spelling lists by visualizing the page we got beforehand, and doing this, I learned enough words to read independently and learn new words beore they appeared on the list, and so did well on pre-tests even though I didn't ace those nearly as often (even in third grade up until about seventh or eighth grade, it was vastly more efficient to ask my dad how to spell a given word or what a particular written word was than to use a dictionary, and did terrible at our 3rd grade in-class lesson on how to use a dictionary to look words up).
And it is a good thing that you're paying attention to this and the potential to do better in language isn't getting squandered - after all, I had similar problems and basically majored in creative writing while in high school, some college English professors commenting that my writing is publishable (good thing they don't follow my internet posts, LOL). Where there's a will there's a way, so they say.
*Another easily confused word, that is, not another recommendation*
Last edited by UpAndDown; 08/27/11 05:42 PM. Reason: annotation to clarify
