Thank you so much aeh. It turns out I had the date wrong for the IEP meeting, it's on Thursday, not Monday. On Monday we have a parent teacher conference with the current school. For that meeting I am going to continue to advocate for reduced writing requirements (but I'm not expecting to get anywhere, it's pretty obvious they are not going to budge on the issue).
I definitely don't want to after school. I want DS to have a lot of free time to pursue his interests and to play, especially after spending 7 hours at school already. It's a little hard for me to work with him on things like programming, math, and reading music, because those are all weak areas for me (well, I've never tried programming, but it doesn't look particularly interesting). DS has already passed me in all 3 of those areas, but whether it's because he is exceptional at them or more because I have some sort of serious deficit is hard to say. Probably some of both. I am the one who still adds on her fingers, hasn't memorized multiplication facts, still has to say FACE to figure out what the treble clef notes are and can't even remember the mnemonic for the bass clef (despite years of playing piano and good ability to memorize songs), has poor handwriting/horrible pencil grip, can't spell even a lot of extremely common words correctly, took over a decade of practice to learn to type, and am entirely unable to learn another language (except, oddly, sign). I don't feel like I make a very good teacher
He has already seen all of the science videos I am familiar with, he's seen Cosmos, Bill Nye, and Magic School Bus. Are there any other good educational videos? I'd love to show him nature programs, but for some reason people seem to think the most interesting thing animals do is mate and we have not had that conversation yet. DS also loves everything I've told him related to anthropology and I'd love to hear of any resources for that as well.
I will definitely ask about the discrepancy between visual perceptual skills and motor output. They may not be willing to address it in any way, but it certainly doesn't hurt to bring it up and see what they have to say. I will request we do the PAL-II to better place him next year and to allow me to address weaknesses over the summer (hopefully that will get them moving, as me addressing concerns over the summer could potentially save them money in the long run.)
I'm also wondering if I might be able to convince them to give the optional verbal subtests in order to figure out if verbal areas in general are a weakness or if it's a weakness just in similarities. Right now I don't know if similarities or vocabulary is the verbal outlier for him. I also noticed that he scored similarly on word classes to similarities and I think they are measuring about the same thing. As much as I hate to say it, as a person who worked many years with autistic kids it makes me think about the weakness a lot of kids on the spectrum have with FFC's.
I'm also curious about the coding score. This was the only section of the IQ test I sat in for (I was trying to convince DS to squeeze in one more subtest as he wanted to be done for the day) and I noticed that DS quickly memorized the key and no longer looked up by the second row. I suspect that if he hadn't done this his coding score would have been much lower. I'm wondering if it is expected that the kid will memorize the key? The lady who did the test noted he made no errors on the processing speed tests and when I was there she commented that his symbols he drew for coding looked as perfect as the printed material he copied from. Just watching the coding test it was hard for me to understand how it could relate to intellectual ability. It seems to reward fast and sloppy writing and memorization of the key as well as an aggressive approach to timed material. DS appeared calm as could be and didn't appear to rush at all (not that DS has ever rushed, I think he has a congenital lack of ability to understand time constraints.) Plus I'm sure I would do terribly on it, so of course I'm not going to believe it is a good measure of intelligence :P
