With DD, it mattered a lot to her that I explained that she was perfectly capable of learning, as long as she was taught the way she needed to learn. Previously, this had not happened. So we were re-learning how to read, starting over and doing it properly, the way she needed to be taught. It seemed to help her a lot to understand that the failure had been in the teaching, not her. Especially, as aeh notes, when it can feel a bit demeaning to be going back to "c-a-t", essential as it is.
Two random thoughts, in case either are useful.... One, I found that by the time we got to remediation (grade 3), her anxiety around reading and the hiding/ compensating she was doing were very high. We used AAR, and I tried to eliminate as much as possible all reading and writing outside of the AAR materials, so that she was never trying to read anything she had not yet been taught how to read. That had HUGE impact on her anxiety: I only gave her material she could be successful with. If your DD is still trying to manage all her regular classwork, is it possible that remediation may have actually rendered her extra sensitive to the disparity in what she can handle vs what she is being asked to do? And maybe she feels even worse because now she's getting all this extra help that no one else needs and yet somehow she is "still too stupid to be doing her schoolwork"?
Unfortunately, it's hard to underestimate the level of toxic self-labelling and anxiety these kids build up (which, offside, is why I am such a fan of explicitly replacing those self-imposed incorrect labels with factual and support-orienting labels like "dyslexia"). Getting through the anxiety and the defence the child has built to protect themselves can be the hardest part.
And second, on a totally unrelated note, I have found some older kids really respond to the cool Shaywitz MRIs pictures that actually show the changes in neural pathways used to read before and after remediation. You can actually see the functional, but cobbled together and inefficient approach dyslexics will typically use to read, and then how post-remediation the much more concentrated and efficient pathways they can now use to read. While DD and I were doing her remediation, there were days I swear I could see those new neural pathways connecting and building, it was that amazing. (Sorry, I can't seem to find the specific pictures that showed the before/ after best - can anyone help? Maybe they were in the Shaywitz book?)
