My 11 year old son has it. He was very fidgety at age 5. He jumped up and down and did this thing with his hands that looked like he was trying to shake water off of them whenever he was really excited about something, which was often. He thought the world was an exciting place and he seemed to be interested in everything and he loved to talk about those things. He just loved to talk. He talked fast and used his hands a lot when he talked, but he also liked to use a lot of big words that the other kids didn't understand. He didn't go to preschool so most of his life he had been around adults who understood these words so having to dumb down his speech was an adjustment that he had difficulty making. He preferred being with kids who were three and four years older and his good friends were all older gifted kids.
My son loved to talk about interesting things he had heard and read that other kids were not interested in so he often talked to the teachers on the playground instead of playing. He felt safer there anyway. Since academic redshirting is very common here, all of the other boys in his class were older and bigger. Some of them liked to bully kids who were different in any way and because my son was smart, had sensory issues, and couldn't keep up with other kids physically, he was bullied.
But most of the other kids seemed to like him. Some of them would ask him to read things for them because they couldn't read yet. He felt good about that. He also liked to make other kids laugh. Because he enjoyed the social part of school, except for the bullies, I wanted school to work, but we were told by the principal and a teacher to homeschool because our small town school could not provide an appropriate education for a twice exceptional child. When the kindergarten teacher suggested that we hold him back in a transitional first grade the next year because he couldn't color in the lines even though his reading, comprehension, and math were above grade level I knew I really had no choice. We had tried to explain the hypotonia and the fine motor delays but it made no difference. This teacher really believed holding him back and making him practice coloring without OT of any kind would "fix" his problems. She didn't think he needed to learn anything the next year because his reading and math were advanced. My son wanted to learn so I had to homeschool.
My son liked kindergarten except for having to color in the lines which he found boring and difficult because his hands tired easily since he had hypotonia and I didn't know it at that time, but also motor dyspraxia. He wasn't eligible for OT because at 5 he was already reading at a 5th grade level and doing some multiplication. In our state you have to be failing in order to get OT and he was only failing to color in the lines.
My son's favorite thing to do in kindergarten was the puppet theater where he could make up his own show and do voices and make the other kids laugh. He could channel his energy into something creative that didn't involve fine motor skills. His kindergarten was only half-day and because of his sensory issues I think a full day would have been too much for him. He needed to take breaks to move around and when I homeschooled him the next year I let him move around while I read to him and let him practice spelling and math facts orally while jumping on a trampoline.
