Dear Dorothy,
I can't believe how much your daughter sounds like mine. As a baby she repeated her first words at two months. She spoke fluently by eighteen months. How shocked I was when kindergarten rolled around and she began having trouble with letters. By first grade she would know all the answers at home, but do poorly on the test because she couldn't understand the printed directions on the test. Her handwriting was poor, and copying from the board was a problem. Some teachers would let her copy from their books or notes, which helped some. Over the years she struggled, at first with inversions but mostly and always with spelling. Luckily she is a hard worker, and though diagnosed with a reading and spelling disability, has excelled. She is now a senior, and in the National Honors Society. I helped her more that average through the years, especially if she had a lot of reading to do. She still is a poor speller, but thank goodness for computers and spell checkers! Now she copes completely on her own. She loves science and plans to major in biology and go on to med school.
I'm telling you this to let you know that disabilities can be compensated for and your daughter has an excellent chance of doing anything she wants to do. God bless you and her and good luck.
Bev
Dear Dorothy,
This is not normal for a third grader, though it's not possible without testing to determine precisely what is occurring.
Dyslexia is a generic term; it refers to a variety of learning disabilities that are related to verbal functioning. Indeed, your daughter may display a learning disability related to visual processing. This is possible, even with her good reading level, comprehension and memory. It could be that her good auditory processing ability compensates somewhat for a limitation in visual processing. To be frank, though, I'd expect her to be struggling more than she is if she had a serious visual processing difficulty. Only testing can determine this.
Another possibility is simply that she is not working with sufficient deliberateness and is making errors due to speed.
It would be wise to pin down the nature of her problem. Some focused testing for learning disability would accomplish the goal.