My son thinks he is stupid

So I’m not sure what to do.  My son, 8, thinks he is stupid.

He has seemed to be struggling this school year, and I can see that his self esteem is taking a hit…..   He has made a few comments.

Near the end of summer, he told his dad that he wanted to learn how to “write”.  I haven’t been able to find out from him what exactly he meant (Creative writing?  how to spell? – we did cursive first and he could write with a model above him – but not well for writing other things…) – From that, and with my daughters not progressing with the cursive program – we now are learning Italics, which is going well…. but still he can’t really write his own thoughts yet (still learning the alphabet)

He has made a couple of other comments – not being able to remember things (and that does seem to be an issue… you will ask him to do something, and a moment later he says “what did you want?” and I have to say a lot of the narrations from him start with “I can’t remember”….  but he has learned scriptures and things with our memory work, has memorized how to play about 25 songs on the violin, and can tell you where everything is on our Lego Wii games….  I’m wondering if it a problem with how the thing to remember is presented….)

Then the other day discussing something, my dh said something about me being smart – and he said “I’m not smart”.  Of course my dh and I disagreed with him and said that he was smart – but you could tell that he figured we just said that because parents say that…..

Then yesterday we were talking about Sunday School, and he said that so-and-so could read really well…. then said that he can’t read.  Well, of course he CAN read.  He is struggling a little with it, so he isn’t that fluent… (I’ve been wondering about the vision therapy type stuff….) 

I look at the stuff that has happened these last few months…..

We moved to a more family based learning…. he is basically in “Year 3” and his sister (who is advanced for his age – and very similar in abilities) is in “Year 1” – so they are doing almost everything together.  History, Science, etc.  In Math, we changed to RS this year… he was only about 1/2 the way through Year 2 MEP at the end of last way, and his sister (who demanded math) was 3/4 of the way through Year 1 of MEP, so they tested to both start Level B of RS – so they are even doing math together right now.  They were doing the new handwriting program together for a while, he is now ahead of her a couple of lessons.

He hasn’t passed his swimming level in over a year… in September his sister passed into the same level…. although she was actually moved back to her previous level a few weeks ago.  He has been struggling with violin… he hasn’t been practicing a lot.  He was just at the edge of being able to be in the Book 2 class at the start of this year… and although the teacher had said at the end of last year that he wouldn’t be in the Book 2 class for this year, she put him in it at the beginning of this year.  But he isn’t keeping up – so she has moved him back to the book 1 class (which, btw, his sister is in….) – and I know that is bothering him a lot.  Especially since the kids he was with last year are all in the book 2 class.

I think he is a Visual-Spatial Learner (I haven’t done a lot of research – but i know he seemed to fit that category a couple of years ago – he would likely be really struggling even more in a regular school) – but he can creat such fantastic Lego creations and other models – I could see him becoming an engineer or an architect or something.  He has always struggled with language (barely talking at age 2 – tends to stammer, etc) and so much of school emphasises that.   

And to top it off – his sister is very bright, and I’d say almost certainly gifted.  I started her with math when she turned 4 because when she was 3.5 she would listen in to his math and answer before he could… so I gave her her own math (And took it slowly).  

I know I need to talk to him (when I can get him alone… not much 1 on 1 time around here!) but I don’t know how to convince him.  He also is a perfectionist (of the sourt that doesn’t want to even try if he thinks he won’t be able to do something perfectly) – that has improved a lot – but I’m sure that is just added into the negative self-talk that I see must be in his head.

I also know that he had some problems come up in the 1st cub pack (we changed cub packs after a couple of weeks) where the kids were supposed to write down information for an outing…. all the PS kids, who are used to writing pages of stuff at school, well, he ended up having a leader discretely write it for him (this was before we had changed writing programs too)

Any suggestions, advice, etc?