My ds is now 9, nearly 10 and has Asperger's. He is very similar in terms of not being able to concentrate in school and being highly resistant to writing, yet also being a prolific reader.
I would say the first thing to consider is why its harder for him to concentrate at school than at home. Obviously there is the fact that he's in a class full of wriggly, noisy children, but its also worth considering other distractions such as lots of pictures on walls, artwork hung on strings from ceilings, being able to see what's going on outside the room (windows and doors). For my ds, smells from the dinner hall were another issue.
For writing, over the past two years his classwork has been done using:
- cloze worksheets (where they've removed a portion of the words for them to fill in the blanks, like these examples
- writing frames, limiting the amount of text that needed to be written and helping to compartmentalise it into distinct areas to be thought about separately
- longer pieces of writing done on an Alphasmart - although when I say longer, the rest of the class would have written a couple of pages, while ds would be lucky to produce a paragraph.
His teachers have differentiated the curriculum wherever possible to encompass writing choices that would peak ds's interest, so books and authors he likes, for modern inventions he did some work on the Nintendo DSi, character profiles for characters from Star Wars etc.
He still writes a lot less than his peers, but is able to show his potential and capabilities within the short things he does write, purely because he's interested in the subject matter.
He also has regular 'get up and move around time' scheduled into his work. (This was advised by both the EP and OT.) The teachers facilitate this by asking him to give out worksheets etc and by giving him the job of tidying the bookshelves and keeping them tidy, so he always looks like he has a legitimate reason to his peers for not being at his desk.
My ds has a slow processing speed and his maths teacher has recognised that whenever they've finished discussing a topic, without fail he asks to go to the toilet. She has now learned to let him go and he always comes back ready to start work, whereas if he is made to sit and get stuck in straight away he will produce hardly any work or get upset and frustrated. He needs that window of time and peace, away from the classroom to process what he's just learned.
With regards to maths, we have had real trouble with him not wanting to write the sums. He is excellent at mental maths, but struggles with longer, staged problems because he refuses to write jottings and loses his place etc. What has helped with this is using MathsWhizz at home. It actually works through the problem in stages with them and does the writing, iyswim. It has meant that we were able to see that he did understand the question/concept and it really was the writing that was holding him back. He is now doing MathsWhizz at home for fun and Mathletics through the school. His teacher can select exercises for him to work on in Mathletics and also keep a track of his progress. This week for the first time ever he has volutarily used jottings in class. It turned out to be on a topic he'd done on MathsWhizz at the weekend, so it was reassuring to see that he is taking on board and using what he learns on there.
This year (year 5) he has excellent teachers who are particularly adept at differentiating the work to keep him interested, as well as managing his need for movement and concentration breaks and he has come on a lot. He is actually writing quite a bit more, but its taken since year 3 of them working with him in the above mentioned ways to get to this point. He is still using the AlphaSmart for longer pieces of writing and is allowed to use a computer for homework. The Ed Psych and School have both asked for a laptop as part of his Statutory Assessment. Pretty much everyone is agreed that he will need to use a laptop in secondary school. He still attends handwriting group once a week though, as we all feel that he still needs to carry on practising his handwriting and not lose the skill completely and he still handwrites everything during maths lessons.