Thank you so much for all your input!
On Dyslexia: we previously used Spalding's program (which was initially one of the reasons I couldn't figure out why she was testing as if I had taught her with a whole-word method, since *everything* is done phonetically there, except the word "eye"...), but in hindsight, I think it was too taxing on her memory to start a program by learning all the phonographs and all their sounds. Thankfully, we are friends with a certified educational therapist / dyslexia tutor, and when she found out about dd's struggles, she offered to start tutoring her with an Orton-Gillingham based program for dyslexics twice a week at no cost to us. She'll start this next week, and I'm cautiously optimistic about it! I have looking into both AAR and LoE in the past and will talk with the dyslexia tutor about what she recommends after they have some time to work together for a while.
On Memory: What aeh said makes sense. So, in the interest of figuring out "what comes next", it seems then that my teaching needs to incorporate context to a greater extent. We do everything in context, usually, because it just makes sense to me that that's how kids learn - but it seems even more vital for her to have things in context, so I should be more conscientious about this, if I want her to remember things.
On Mood: We did read the Explosive child, and I remember being really blown away regarding the "kids do well when they can" concept. Before we started her dyslexia eval, we would've checked all those "bad-attitude" tick marks for her: lazy, doesn't try, doesn't pay attention, rude for no reason, etc. It started to make sense once we really understood how frustrated she was over not being able to read, and how discouraged she was in feeling like she was never going to be able to read. I feel like I could laugh at the title "Why bright kids get poor grades" because that's exactly what I thought when I initially got her WISC scores back! I mean, I *knew* she couldn't read well, but I thought she was going to blow the test out of the water, otherwise! I will try and see if our library has it.
On other things: What tests make up verbal cognition, exactly? I didn't see something with that specific title on our score reports, and I don't have a ton of experience, so I'm not really sure how to judge if her verbal cognition is high. Verbal comprehension was only 113 (not surprising, because she often zones out when others are talking or just blows right over them with what she has to say), and her Verbal Learning and Verbal Learning Recall were both exactly 50th %ile. She made no errors on the Environmental Symbols, Letter-Symbol Identification, and Word Reference Association subtests of the Ella, and scored well on Word Associations. On her CELF, I have standard scores of 13 on Understanding spoken paragraphs and 14 on Formulating sentences, but all I know is that the average is 10, so I don't have percentile rankings or know what the standard deviation or anything is. But I don't know if any of these are actually part of what makes up verbal cognition.
