Also, any advice to help her with writing in the meantime? When I say that writing is the worst form of torture for this child, I am NOT joking. We encourage her to type as much as possible. Is this the way to go for now?
I am an elementary school teacher as well as a mom. When I have a child who is having a lot of difficulty writing, I teach them (and their parents) to break the process into two parts. First the child says a sentence orally (for example, the answer to a worksheet question, or a sentence in a story she is composing) and the parent takes dictation. Next (and perhaps after a break) the parent dictates the students words back to her, and the student writes the sentence down. The parents can do this very slowly, repeating each word as necessary, sounding out words if necessary, and basically giving as much help as is needed for the child to write her own words. I find many students who are slow writers do well when they don't have to remember their sentences as they are writing.
At first this can take a long time, depending on how slowly or poorly the student writes. So maybe the student might at first just write one or two sentences in the sory and the parent could write the rest. As the child gets faster at writing, the child could write the first few sentences from dicatation, an dthen copy in her own handwriting what the parent wrote. the goal is to just keep scaffolding the assignment so the student gets practice in all three skills: 1) composing her own ideas into sentences 2) handwriting 3) writing from words in her own head.
