Longcut: I'm pretty sure Planet Earth is on netflix, so I will start previewing that tonight. Not sure about Life, but I will look into it as well, thanks
aeh: As usual everything you say clarifies things a lot
1. It makes perfect sense that the CELF scores back up his WISC verbal score. He did get a 13 on Word Classes vs. an 11 on Similarities, which isn't a huge difference, but could reflect possible greater difficulty with expressive language. One thing that is difficult to account for is his medication situation at the time of testing. He was unmedicated (more accurately meds wearing off) for much of the CELF and some of the OT stuff, but he was fully medicated for the IQ test as I recall. This ended up being the case because we did the cognitive testing in the am and most of the other testing after school so that he would miss less class time (DS is only medicated for the hours he is at school). The lady giving the CELF said she has never had another student get all the way to the end and get every item correct on Following Directions, but she could not give him credit for a bunch of them as she had to repeat the directions (because he was not listening the first time). I was actually in the room for much of the CELF to help manage behavior.
2. I definitely think the Symbol Search result was accurate. DS loves board games and card games, but there is one game he has always hated and does terribly at: Scene It. We gave the game away years ago because he refused to play it at all. OTOH, he can beat all of us at SET, which is a visual and speed based game as well. As far as coding goes, maybe the fact that he wrote so slowly and perfectly made up for the time he saved by memorizing the key and his score ended up being a good indicator of his ability anyway? Overall I'm not especially worried about processing speed, DS seems to be a pretty quick thinker for the most part (except he sometimes is slow to formulate responses or follow through on directions).
3. I don't know that I have any special intellectual ability myself. I was labeled borderline MR and ADD in elementary school and shipped off to the IU to be educated. I got a poor education there because most of the kids had academic challenges and there was a lot of disruptive behavior in the classroom. I did get to be top of the class for academics and behavior though (I still have all of my two dollar bills and awards for grades and behavior). When I finally got out of special ed I was pretty far behind, but by 11th grade I excelled at writing and I qualified for a program where I got to go to the local community college for 12th grade based on my verbal SAT score (my 530 on math almost kept me out of the program, but they made an exception because my verbal was so high). I ended up loving college and graduated with honors (so pretty sure my IQ results way back when were wrong). I was good at art, writing, music composition, poetry, history, sociology, psych, and science. Mostly I was the opposite of DS! I read very fast and DS reads sooo slooow. But so does his dad (who was ID'd gifted and who is amazing at math and programming, I swear he thinks in formulas). I've never considered myself to be especially intelligent though and I can't do the amazing stuff DS can do. I don't have any working memory to speak of, if you list 3 numbers I'll forget the 2nd and 3rd trying to recall the first. But I am a fast thinker. I may not be good at math, but I can calculate what 6% off would be was faster than DS's father can and just today his dad was determining what portion of our med dose to send into school and I told him 17 plus one to offset rounding and he took over 5 minutes to determine that 18 was the right number to send. I keep trying to explain to him that I am bad at math calculations, not bad at thinking! He kept asking how I could have figured it out so fast. I kept wondering how he could have taken 5 minutes to figure it out! I do think we all have some pretty weird brains in this family!
