Wow, Pemberley, it sounds like you have found a fantastic school option, one that really means it when they claim to individualize, and is willing to provide the specific kinds of remediation and teaching your daughter needs. Wonderful!
For what it's worth, here's some pieces of our journey so far, with hopes that something in here will be helpful and not just repeating things you already know. There's lots of cool technology out there we haven't tried yet; this is more of generic "what are the skills we have to work on" kind of story. I am going to count on aeh correcting me in all the spots I go wrong and misquote her, though.
With respect to reading, as I understand it, the flow of skills is loosely from decoding to fluency to comprehension, recognizing there's lots of reinforcing between each. The most challenging piece is the higher-level comprehension skills - making inferences and connections. When DD finished her OG remediation (about a year and a half ago), she was terrible at this. She could tell me every factual detail about what happened in the story, but ask her why she thinks someone did X, or if she's ever been in a situation like that character, and she was just one big blank stare. (Fortunately, aeh had primed me to expect this, which helped subdue the panic. It was a VERY blank stare on what seemed like very basic questions).
We didn't end up using any of the specific programs aeh suggested yet, because DD's teacher last year seemed to be giving her exactly the kind of homework assignments she needed to address this weakness. Every week, she did a "reading response" as her homework, which slowly increased in complexity and worked her stepwise into being able to extrapolate from what the story said to why she thought the characters made the choices they did, how they related to each other, how events in their lives related to events in DD's own life, or real life, or other stories, etc. It seemed to be exactly what DD needed, and I saw clear improvement.
As for fluency, all we did was keep her reading aloud to us every night, creeping up from a paragraph to a page to every other page to a chapter. She has progressed astoundingly, and now (grade 5) reads for pleasure a couple hours a night (holy yikes and yeah!!!! It's been amazing to watch). I'd note that in the early days post-remediation, she would have me re-read the parts she read out loud, because otherwise she missed too much. Over time, she needed that less, and now not at all. (I should note that reading out loud requires dyslexics to do something quite different than when they read silently; it's way more difficult and demanding to read every part of every word, and not just skip from one key word root to the next). The improvement in her ability to both read and comprehend at the same time was quite visible. She may alternate between Eragon and Thea Stilton, but interspersing lots of really easy texts seems to keep her confidence up and energizes her for the harder slogs (random aside: did you know Eragon was written by a 15 year old, obviously very gifted kid with a ridiculous vocabulary? Cool role model).
So as far as I understand it, these are the key skills to work on next. Our DD is much less severely affected by her LDs than yours, so we have gotten away with less structured approaches, but I think the resources aeh has suggested address similar needs, but more systematically. Interestingly, DS (grade 7) is neither dyslexic nor dysgraphic (still a mystery that kid. Working hypothesis severe inattentive ADHD, expressive language, and not sure what else messing up the writing? A flavour of ASD-ishness about him too). Anyways, two years older, and the more this stuff gets easier for his sister, the harder it gets for him, despite reading way beyond grade level for years. He's in a pretty intellectually-demanding gifted class, and remediation on the side is not feasible - we're drowning in incomplete schoolwork as it is (argh). But I've spent the last two years trying to build these principles and skills into mentoring him on his homework every night.
For him, structure is really critical. The more we can make the task visual, ordered, a coherent pattern, and even better, a set of rules, the better. So graphic organizers, mind maps, etc, are really helpful. I made him a diagram of the five-paragraph essay, with a breakdown of the role of each sentence within each paragraph. That helps. He draws (bubbles and connectors) his thesis, main points, key evidence, etc, to make a visual map before he starts writing. (There's some good software and apps for this too. We use Inspiration but there's probably a ton of newer options. Look for something that takes your visual map and transforms it into both essay structure text and slides. The goal is not to have to rewrite anything, just keep expanding the text). With respect to to content, I recognize that any task with inference is liable to send him under the table sobbing, so those are particularly heavily supported, with lots of Socratic Q&A before getting near the keyboard, to ease him into it.
For research-based projects, he's found the highlighting function of google Read and Write quite useful (I think Co-Writer does this too?). When he diagrams his paper, he'll assign each major sub-topic a colour. As he does research on the web, he highlights key info by topic colour, then pushes a button that dumps it all into a word processing file, sorted by colour, and including links to where the text came from. He can then rearrange the selected text within each topic area into related clumps. Bold key words that might end up being sub-headings or just key points. The result is a reference document that basically gives him the structure and flow of his paper, so now he just needs to put his words around it. We're also thinking of trying him on some basic project management software - Gantt charts might help Mr Visual break down big jobs into manageable tasks, and better understand the concept of timelines... we hope.
For DD the ideas and words come easily; it's just writing them down that's the problem (in contrast to her brother, where finding the ideas and especially the words is the big problem). So I mostly just count the days until puberty gives her a more voice-recognition-friendly voice
. To survive in the meantime, she jumps between voice recognition, word prediction, and just plain typing, whichever is the least annoying at the moment. All three take practice and training to be more help than hindrance (but I think your DD has had lots of that?) Word prediction can be a big help. Also, for DD I will still occasionally scribe on a big project, when thinking about spelling just gets too much in the way of thinking, or it's just plain taking too long. (We are still (slowly) beavering away at All About Spelling, just to try to reduce how much it gets in the way of her *thinking*). Recently, for example, she wrote a story. Took a week to write three pages, then she added 6 more in a couple hours with me scribing. (She's starting to get the hang of punctuation, so I scribed verbatim, and let her add in all the needed punctuation afterwards). I also sometimes read her stuff to her, as she still finds it easier to identify errors (both in grammar and content) when hearing it vs seeing it. She'll use the text-to-voice for this as well, but it is an annoying voice...
OK, as always I have gone on way tooooooooooo long. Hope there's something helpful in all this.
