Hi Katelyn,
I started the other post, but was on vacation last week.
Your DD sounds so much like ours. She started doing the same things around the same ages. It has always been hard to figure out how much she knows. She has some perfectionist tendencies and likes to be very confident before she will show off her skills. She was definitely a sneak reader.
It all depends on what your definition of a reader is as to weather or not you think she is reading. She sure sounds like she is starting to read.
DD4 Did this as well and then took a break and was interested more in math for a while. Now she is reading for sure. It was not an over night thing, like others on the board have said. It was a gradual process of learning skills over about a two year period of time. We did not formally teach her to read but we got her magnet letters and wrote out words for her to sound out and read lots of books.
For a long time I did not know if she was reading or not. One day she would surprise us and read something we knew she could not have memorized. But when we asked her what something said she just was not interested.
Just after her 4th birthday she decided she was interested and now she is reading everything.
It seems to me from watching her that the ability to sound things out came early. But the ability to isolate one word on a page of words, focus on that and move on to another word and still get the content, is what took some time for her. Once she got that all the reading skills she had been collecting for the past two years just fell into place.
I hope this helps. It is so interesting and exciting to watch them develop and learn new things.
