Your daughter is of a similar age as my son. At school, people tend to think he's distracted or not focused. From my point of view, he seems under utilized and misunderstood at school. He's mysterious to most. Although his grades are good, his standardized testing is high and he was identified as gifted at school, we still saw frustration in his output in writing and poor direction following and teachers reporting behavior problems. We pursued testing and he was diagnosed with a writing learning disability and some executive functioning problems - working memory and writing fluency. We're still very much on the way to figuring out how to support those skills and also keep him learning at a high ability level. But, this insight has been tremendously beneficial. It has helped us to understand him, helped us to advocate for him at school and helped him understand himself. We are just starting to get therapy and accomodations in place and I'm already seeing anxiety lifting and grades going up and better representing is actual abilities.
Here's a few thoughts that might be helpful for you moving forward:
• Read about what it means to be 2e. Read about how 2e kids present symptoms... some will present more as disabled, some more as gifted and some average out in the classroom. Also read about how you would go about getting a child diagnosed. If possible, taking the child to an accessor who's famililar with gifted and 2e is best. You would need a comprehensive evaluation that looks at intelligence, academic performance and behavior. If a child is 2e, their full scale IQ might not be a good representation of their true abilities, the administrator can generate a general ability index score instead. I can't say if your child is 2e or not, but there might come a point where something seems off or there's a sudden crash/burn and you need to recognize it and act on it. Don't expect that school will catch a 2e kid or quickly put support in place. I am definitely glad that 2e was on my radar as a possibility, otherwise I think he probably would've either had a misdiagnosis from the school or he would've just flat out refused to go to school or write.
• My son had a similar reading experience. Had many baseline reading skills at 3, but didn't really put it all together until 6. He then shot through reading instruction at lightening speed and now scores really high on school assessments. He loves being read to. For many years he listened to audiobooks for hours a day plus me reading to him. It wasn't until he was about 9 that he started reading a ton independently. Now he'll wake up and read a 100-200 page book before breakfast or a 400 page book over a weekend. I think there was a bit of a gap between what kind of content he wanted to read and his reading ability/endurance. It took a while for those to line up.
There are 2 things that I think make my son hard to understand at school:
1. His biggest strength is visual/spatial. This is basically not used at school. Other maybe than doing math, which he excels at. There's some material out there about visual spatial strengths not being understood and supported within the school environment.
2. He has a working memory deficit. It's starting to look like he has poor verbal working memory, but excellent visual spatial memory. This isn't commonly known or understood (whereas I think most schools and people are somewhat familiar with things like ADHD or dyslexia). But now that I know this, I understand him so much more and there's less frustration from both us and him.
I don't necessarily think that your child has the same diagnosis as him… but I wanted to show you how a child's strengths and weaknesses can both make them feel like a square peg in a round hole.
I don't have any possible diagnoses suggestions for you, who am I to say… but, I just wanted you to see how having a full assessment could be a benefit. I am totally glad had it done. A bit of a relief to have more understanding. Having hard data from an outside expert is helpful for advocacy at school, works much better than me as a mom saying "he really needs differentiation"
