A little thought.

My summertime challenge is always to figure out what we are going to do homeschooling the next year.  I get more involved in the homeschooling in the summer than I do the rest of the year, choosing resources and implementing a schedule.  Then, I am a pretty hands off homeschooling mom.  I may have to get more involved in these last 2 years (sob!) because my daughter has been 'little mama"  since my youngest son's birth and has bossed him around for me and since we've been homeschooling, she's been my assistant teacher, basically making him do his work every day and checking up on him and now she has graduated and I am not sure what she is going to be doing this fall.  She's not either.  She may start some on-line college classes or she may take some time and work on writing her book.  She's been working on it for a couple of years between other things, but we might be able to give her the gift of some time to work on it, before we toss her out into the world.  She's not even 18 yet.  My oldest didn't start college until a year after he graduated from high school and that's not the end of the world.  He will finish college and move to graduate school at 23.

So anyway, back to the next 2 years with the youngest.  He is the most nontraditional learner of the three.  I have done some research and I believe the term for what my son is (not that he can be labeled exactly of course) is twice exceptional.  Actually, he's probably at least quadruply exceptional.  He's very smart, has a vocabulary that could put most college professors to shame, is very good at math, doing even very difficult problems without writing them down but he cannot spell and can barely write, despite trying a bunch of different spelling and writing programs.  I am not sure where to begin with him. 

Here's an example of an interaction with him that occured last night.  My daughter is reading our current book, something about time travel ...and one of the lines said something about the timbre of a character's voice.  My daughter didn't know how to pronounce, said timber? and paused and my son pronounced it perfectly.  So, after looking at me to make sure he was correct, she looked at him and said "How do you know that?"  He said, I was analyzing the syntax of what you were saying and that seemed like a likely word and then we discussed that timber and timbre are spelled very similarly and he probably got it from the fact that she said timber, but really he truly has absolutely no idea how either one of them is spelled, except maybe that they start with a T and that was evident on further questioning.  My question is how can he read so well and have no idea how anything, and I mean anything, is spelled?  Anyone have any clues?  Should we tackle the spelling and try to conquer it or should we bypass it with technology?  Also, the handwriting is an issue and the first thing anyone says is that he can type, but he really can't type much at all, because spelling becomes an issue then too. 

It's going to be interesting trying to figure out what to do.