Hi, Raoul,
My child is 2E as well. I'll offer some ideas from our experience and see if anything is useful for you.
He is also dyslexic, dyscalculic and is followed by a graphology therapist.
Do you have therapies in place for the dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia? Experts here recommend particular methods to teach reading for children with dyslexia (Orton-Gillingham is one such method, there are others, I don't know them all but will leave that to experts).
First, I'd make sure that your son is getting all the therapies he needs, so that his disabilities hinder him less and less over time.
Our son has never been formally diagnosed as dysgraphic, but he has had a lot of difficulty with written expression. We still do speed-writing practice drills as a way of making his writing more fluent (copying a text, seeing how many letters he can write legibly in 60 seconds, gradually increasing to 2 minutes).
When you talk with people who are involved in the "giftedness" stuff in France, it looks like the only way to get the gifted child interested in school when there are problems is to skip a grade … I am quite confident in that is not a solution in the case of my child.
It wasn't for mine either... considered it, but decided against. We're glad we chose as we did. I think there is more than one path through this process.
Nevertheless, doing the homeworks is just entering war at home. I and his mother too are completely lost in front of that.
You have my sympathy. We've been there too. We had the most success by (1) praising wildly even the smallest success and (2) breaking things into steps, and doing only one step at a time, with a break between.
The big question for me is how I can try to challenge him on a ground he would enjoy to be challenged on. ... It is very hard to get my son interested in things. It does not mean that he is not interested in anything (he has a lot of imagination, can play with anything, he is very fond of books but not of reading them).
I'm not sure what's available there...surely there are things to be involved in where his skills are valued. Cub scouts, Lego league, chess club, Odyssey of the Mind or Destination Imagination tend to be pretty supportive places for unusual kids to find both friends and interests. It isn't that hard to start most of these up, if they're not already available.
I wonder if your son would like filmmaking or photography, bypassing his academic weaknesses but giving him room for self-expression?
Hope that helps,
DeeDee
