My apologies. By early reader, I meant emergent reader. She is slowly working her way through the Bob books. This is new as she had zero interest a month or so ago. She was more receptive to her Montessori teacher asking her to do it than us. But while she is now proud of reading them, she gets very upset that she can't read bigger words. On one day, she asked me how to spell something. I don't recall the word but it was 7-8 letters long. I did not realize she had already tried to write it, and when I spelled it for her (I was cooking at the time), she burst into tears because she had "got it wrong." At that time she wasn't writing any words other than her name so there really was no way she could have done any better. I told her she had made a great guess at the word from the letters she had written, and was doing fine.
Her general pattern in most skills (from toddlerhood) is to be cautious and hesitant (and presumably practice on her own). So that suddenly we turn around one day and she's walking, skipping, singing on pitch, drawing intricate pictures, etc). The practice and lead up, is either internal, or surreptitious). It looks like she is or was trying to do that with reading, and hit an unexpected wall. At that point she maintained for a while that she no longer liked books. And no, we were not applying outside pressure about reading.
