ljoy, can you tell us a little bit more about her challenges in school, specifically her writing and/or reading challenges? ... I'd recommend an evaluation by a Speech Language Pathologist (which you could request from the school as part of an IEP eligibility review).
...In the meantime, I'd also recommend more private testing - for the speech eval. My ds' speech eval did not have #s low enough to qualify for speech services through the school district, but did show a significant discrepancy in subtests, very similar to the WISC in range. He was given a diagnosis of dysgraphia + expressive language disorder by his SLP, and he's worked with the same private SLP now for several years, and for him - it was *the* single most important educational "help" that he's had.
The biggest writing issue is a complete inability to write anything requiring original thought in class or in finite time. She can copy sentences or write quick notes, possibly slower than average but it happens. She has gotten exactly 80% on every social studies and literature test all year. The last one was sent home because she was not in class that day and I found out they include a long section of multiple choice followed by two writing prompts; I strongly suspect she always gets 100% on the multiple choice and no-words-written on the paragraphs. At home she can create the paragraphs but it takes many hours. I need to sit with her and ask things like "It mentions this character. What do you know about this character? I haven't read the book - why would she do that?" Every time she says something, I tell her to write it down (which she can do well enough). Eventually we get enough to call it a day.
Sometimes I get the impression that it hasn't occurred to her that she needs to say these things out loud/on paper. I think she gets stuck in some sort of loop where she is filtering her expression to only say things that are not obvious, and they all seem obvious to her, so she says nothing at all. A lot of what we have done at home this year to bring her output up is to have her turn in work full of the dumb answers, the absolute lowest possible acceptable answer, because at least she can produce that. Her quality has dropped to about what she was able to produce in 3rd grade, but she can do it now instead of turning in nothing at all.
Reading and writing are both a bit slow and labored. She really prefers me to read fiction to her over reading it herself, though she will read on her own all day long if I don't have time. Her pace feels slow to me, but I know I read fast so I try not to judge her by that. She avoids writing whenever she can get away with it and looks for the fewest-words solution when jotting notes, but she will write them eventually. Handwriting, punctuation, and grammar are fine. Spelling is improving, but she can still spell the same word three different ways in the same paragraph and not notice.
Other things we see at home that might or might not be related are: zero sense of time unless she has set a timer, can't formulate a response to a question when anyone in the room is talking, took a long time to learn to follow a sequence of directions (take off your shoes, put the book in your room, and wash your hands so you can have a snack), has a very hard time making a timely response to a stimulus like speaking on cue in a play or catching a thrown beach ball.
The tester believes her main difficulty is in retrieval speed: it takes her a very long time to call up things that she definitely knows. I'm... not convinced. This is a part of it, for sure, but it doesn't explain all the issues. I think we should do further testing with a 2E specialist; though the existing office has been lovely to work with and is willing to do more, I don't think they have the expertise we need. So right now my wish list for further testing includes phonological processing and SLP specifically applied to an HG kid.
