6 y/o will not engage with school

[ooops8]

Our DC is six and in Yr1.

He is very bright. Far ahead of his peers in Maths and English. He reads and spells with ease. He has been assessed outside the school setting for his abilities.

However, he will not engage in class.

He he has been moved to a table by himself because he's so easily distracted.

He refuses to do the work set when it's well within his capabilities. When he does do the work it's sloppy and he will not follow the rules of the assignment.

An example is he knows the answer to the maths question but point blank refuses to explain how he got the answer because he "just knows".

I'm at the end of my tether, as is his teacher.

Any advice much appreciated

Op from spending some time in a Facebook group for gifted children, it became obvious to me that there is a big overlap between giftedness and (other) neurodivergence. Perhaps have a look and see what you think? The group is called Parenting High Potential and it is run by a charity (I am not affiliated with it in any way). There is quite a bit of discussion about helping HLP children access school in a meaningful way

ADHD?

Get the educational psychologist in to assess

He needs to be assessed probably for ADHD. If they are highly intelligent then it can be masked. Have you come across the term 2e - "Twice Exceptional"?

The other possibility is he may be on the gifted end of IQ in which case he might be capable of working much higher than he's currently being expected to which is making him bored.

I would try to reframe "refuses" as this is quite combative and places him at fault, whereas he's probably not doing it purposefully to be annoying.

Try looking at it from the angle: What's getting in the way of this?

For example, if you have a very quick mathematical brain, it can be that you just "know" the answer because it just feels inherently right, and being asked to explain how you got there is really hard to do because you might literally not know how you got there. I know that my DS who is a maths whiz gets frustrated with this, although he has now learned how to write down what they expect to see (he's 15 now). But he gets the answer without explicitly going through the process. He then has to sort of reverse engineer the process to write that down. I seem to remember finding this a bit annoying at school too.

It's like if someone asked you what 10 + 3 is - you'd say 13. How do you know? Well I just do - I haven't done anything to simplify it, it's just perfectly obvious that it's 13. (What the questioner might be looking for in that case is counting 3 on from 10, but for most adults, that is so ridiculously far behind in the distant past that we don't need to do it any more and just add the numbers automatically.) For someone who is very good at maths this same process is happening with more complicated operations too.

And likewise with instructions of an assignment: Neurodivergent people tend to struggle with things like this. It can be due to taking something overly literally and focusing in deep on the wrong part (e.g. "I've answered this question, why does it matter what order I did it in??") or it can be due to poor working memory, which affects the processing of tasks with multiple steps, meaning that they will focus on one step of the task and forget all the other parts. Or it can be due to difficulties with sequencing, often seen in dyspraxia and dyslexia, but also present in other neurotypes. ADHD can cause issues with prioritisation where everything seems equally important, so the person includes information which is irrelevant or leaves out information which is relevant because they make the wrong call.

Thank you all.

@BertieBotts that's very interesting information. Thanks for taking the time to post.

I will always advocate for DS. He can be challenging so while I understand his teacher's frustration, I genuinely feel his behaviour is outside his control.

He's very kind and loving but absolutely struggles with to follow instructions. It's almost like he can't stop himself. When we question his behaviour he gets upset and says he doesn't know why he does things but he can't stop it.

And I completely get where you're coming from re explaining workings in maths - it's like it doesn't occur to him that it wouldn't end the answer so how could he possibly explain the obvious.

I though all children were like DS until he started school. None of his peers can recite the periodic table and give a detailed explanation of each element!

Have you asked him why?

@cestlavielife yes I agree, but it really as simple as it sounds, we needed an Ed Psych to access our DS. Our LA didn’t even have one in post. We paid a lot of money for private assessment, this was 14 years ago.

Consider potentially ADHD with autism? It sounds like he needs more interesting work regardless

Er, no, I think I only found out that the periodic table existed in about year 8

Sounds like you have a smart little cookie there. :)