DS14 has a very similar profile to JAMD's daughter. He was first diagnosed with a learning disability by a private psychologist due to the big gap between his ability and his achievement in grade 1. The school board accepted the psychologist's report, and he started getting some extra help with reading. I didn't see much improvement with the school program, so he did private tutoring in phonics for 18 months when he was 6 and 7. It really improved his reading skills. He now has great comprehension although he still tends to miss some of the small words when reading out loud. Spelling is still a big problem. The term Dyslexia is not officially used in Ontario, but fits him well.
He received a grant to obtain a computer for classroom use in grade 5. He now types all his essays. Spellcheck fixes almost all his spelling problems, although it misses things like latter for later. Learning the times tables and how to tell time were also an issue, but in grade 9, he gets to use a calculator and now he is considered to be good in math.
There are programs like Read and Write Gold or WordQ that can read the text to your daughter on the computer. You can scribe for your daughter for essays until she gets better at typing. This would allow her to show how much she knows and removes the bottleneck of getting it on paper.
The public school system worked for my son. He is now enrolled in a high school gifted program, and gets time and a half for exams and the use of a computer for exams with lots of writing. He was blessed with executive functioning issues as well as dyslexia and that is the biggest challenge right now.
