I'm reading the most interesting book now called Raising Topsy-Turvy Kids: Successfully Parenting Your Visual-Spatial Child, by Alexandra Shires Golon. It may not have anything to do with your DD, but I thought that I would through this out and see where it lands.
According to this wonderful book, Visual-Spatial kids love books, but struggle sometimes to learn to read. Here is a quote:
Learning to read can be an added challenge to the child who thinks in pictures, rather than in words, and to the student who learns whole-to-part, not step-by-step....Most children today are taught to read phonetically; a sequential process where learning the sounds of letters leads to learning the sounds of blends, then combining those to learn whole words. The process is slow and not meaningful to topsy-turvy kids. Most VSLs learn to read best by using a process of recognizing and comparing whole words, not letters and blends... Visual-spatial children should be taught to read sight words, particularly words that have been decorated with color and characters. Students should select words that they are curious and passionate about first to build a picture vocabulary in their minds. Help them decorate a colorful collection of their sight words in an album or special box.
I first heard about this book here, and it may be old hat by now. But everything in this book explains my highly VS kid. It even addresses VS learner's inability to do multiplication tables easily, since they need to form a mental picture in their minds of the math facts. She even goes so far as to say that bottlenecks are possible with VS kids when their brains pause during an activity where they need to translate from a non-pictorial item (writing, or math facts) into a image that their brains can handle.
So it may be that both of your girls are gifted, but they are gifted in different ways. One may be a audio-sequential learner and one may be a visual-spatial learner?
Just a thought to keep in mind. Or not!
