Home Schooling - OK Let's Try it?

My son is verbally and visually gifted with a processing disorder which is causing some real difficulties at school. I tried to find a school with programs that focus on his type of learning. I couldn't find any - So he attends the local elementary school and at first it seemed things would go good but I was wrong, they've been going steadily downhill.

When I meet with his teachers I hear things like, "he's not working to his potential." "He doesn't do the work, he just sits there." "I need to stand over him and constantly bring him back into focus." "He's not organized." "His knowledge is above grade level but his work is way below grade level." "He won't stop reading in class."

My son is a conceptual learner - tell him something and he's got it right away. He's a project based producer not a worksheet based producer. Give him a project and he'll eagerly bite into it and produce results beyond expectations. Give him worksheets and you'll never see them again.

For example, his class was assigned two book reports, one could be presented in whatever format they choose, the other was to be written on paper with drawings. For the first book my son choose to make a movie trailer of the book. I taped his ramblings about the book, he took some pictures, downloaded others and then edited the whole mess into a cohesive reader response. This seemed to take no time and his teacher was so impressed she gave him a special postcard note to say how impressed she was. The other report took him forever to write down and his drawings were less then stellar. Her response was to tell me, "he could have done better, as it was lacking. He should have spent more time on it." To me this proved that given the right type of learning tools he could excel beyond anyone's expectations.

My son has requested to be home schooled, I'm convinced its because he just wants to watch TV and play video games all day. I'm not sure what else to do though, he needs someone to keep him on task when tasks are boring. Other things like projects I am confident he'll fly through on his own. I know it's a lot of work but my kid is worth it.

This summer will be the test - we're going to give him projects, let him find projects to do and work towards completing a basic curriculum. If that works we'll seriously look at figuring out how to home school, which may not be easily achieved since I am going back to work.