Your son sounds a lot like my DD9, who is now in fourth grade/ upper elementary in a Montessori school. She has dysgraphia but can write okay; it just takes her longer that other kids and she tries to avoid written work, so her school work doesn't reflect her academic potential. One psychologist recommended that she be allowed some accommodations such as not being required to write full sentence answers when possible and being allowed to use a computer for written work. Her current teacher is great but has been resistant to any of those suggestions. I'm not too worried because everything else is going really well. Have you noticed that your son takes longer to write than other kids, or does he have any trouble with it? What it took to get DD doing her work passably was to set up an incentive system. One teacher had her do three 'works' in the morning work cycle (or produce an equivalent amount of work that the teacher approved) or she had to stay in for recess. The current teacher was having her do some of her overdue works before she was allowed to do a 'dessert work'--i.e., something fun. Both of these motivated her well. Also we set up an at-home point system so she gets rewards for doing well at school. This requires some help from the teacher in letting us know how she did, so we discussed with the teacher and came up with a 'home report card' where the teacher circles yes or no for five objectives--we print out the form that we made up each week and DD is responsible for having the teacher sign it each day. Then she can use the points for whatever--in her case, movies. It helps that she's older because in first grade/lower elementary I don't know if that would have worked, but it's been a miracle this year and her behavior is just amazingly different since we started that. I hope you can work with the teacher to come up with something positive. Good luck!
