He only gets overwhelmed with the worksheets when he tries to complete all of them as well on Tuesday in class. We have drilled into him that he is to bring all of the worksheets home to do, which has helped. And in all honesty, the entire first quarter grading period was review from second grade, so the worksheets were simply more of the same repetition for him. For instance, over the first five weeks there were 16 worksheets on the same topic -- telling time and calculating elapsed time. DS missed 4 questions out of 154 on those worksheets, I don't think missing a few would have hurt him! :-)
That sounds really frustrating for your ds! Who on earth would want to do so many worksheets, especially when it's repetitive and he knows the material? I'd recommend he be allowed to do a reduced # of problems if it's work he understands how to do. I'd also look to see if there is any school district policy in writing re not being required to make up the work missed in a student's home class while in the gifted pullout. I would also make sure they aren't keeping him from recess or other class activities on Tuesday in order to complete the worksheets - that is, in effect, punishing him for having different educational needs.
I am not sure if the issue is idea generation or if it's more of a "from the brain to the paper" issue. DS did indicate yesterday that when he tries to write for very long his hand starts to hurt.
Pain while handwriting can be cause by an unusual grip - one thing you might want to do is google a picture of a correct pencil grip and compare to the grip your ds is using. Also watch to see if he's using good posture. Pain can be a sign of dysgraphia, but you would also be seeing other symptoms too if it's dysgraphia (uneven spacing, poor spelling while writing, uneven pencil pressure, not forming letters consistently the same way, slow handwriting speed, etc - you can google lists of dysgraphia symptoms).
Your ds is 8? One thing that was tremendously helpful for us with each of our children was getting to the ages of 8/9 years old, because they hit some type of maturity gain where they were able to verbalize what was going on with their work in a way that helped me as a parent understand their challenges much better, so definitely ask your ds about what is challenging about writing assignments - both specific assignments and writing in general. I would also pay attention and perhaps purposely contrive a few conversations to see if you think your ds has the same type of issues with verbal communication. Our ds has an expressive language disorder which impacts his ability to get started on writing assignments (it also impacts him in conversation, but that wasn't obvious *at all* until he was around 9 years old and started telling us he couldn't figure out what to say.. because he was very talkative under many different circumstances, and the times that he did struggle with getting language out were almost always with teachers or adults outside our family, so we thought it was shyness... when really it was different type of expressive language being required due to the situation).
If the question of writing comes up in the acceleration meeting, I'd ask the school to do further assessment to determine what the issue is - since there is an issue noted by both of his teachers (gifted and home class). For our ds, the TOWL (Test of Written Language) and the CELF (speech language eval) were both very useful in helping to understand what his challenges with expressive language were.
His gifted pullout teacher welcomes collaboration with the home school teacher, but there seems to be a firewall between the home school and the pullout program (which is run by the county). The home school engenders a feeling of anti - gifted sentiment, considering all of the issues we have had in getting him identified, recognized and served.
The home school may simply have an anti-pullout program sentiment - not something that is just due to your family's pursuit of the program. Our elementary school was definitely not happy about letting students attend our district's gifted pull-out program - to the point that by the time our ds was in school, there were *no* students attending it. Our ds had test scores to qualify, but we had to push to get the school to let him attend... however... once ds had attended for half a year, the school relaxed the attitude about the program and allowed a few more students to attend. I hope your school will continue to let your ds attend, and also relax the requirements for making up busy work.
Good luck with your meeting!
polarbear
