Since then, she's got better and better. She loves to write, even if her spelling is not 100% - we've started the Christmas lists, which are a hoot to read, and over the half term, she's written notes to her friends and a list of all her classmates' names. They weren't all correct but we sat down together and I wrote some of them out the right way for her, rather than tell her she was wrong.
Then, on Friday, we went to London (of which more soon). She sat with us on the train and we had a word wheel puzzle out, where you had to make words up from the letters of the wheel always using the letter in the centre. We'd done quite a few and got most of the obvious ones when she just reached across the table and spelled out a word we'd not thought of but was correct. She enjoyed making up words, and because we had already found most of the words in the list, we allowed her to make up any words and she did really well, better than Monkey in fact (although she was paying more attention).
And then, later in the day, we were sat on a tube on the Victoria Line looking at the stations on the line and I was asking her to find the various names and she was reading them out by spelling out the words and saying them. As she was getting them, she was nearly shouting, "Give me another! Give me a hard one this time!" and true to form, she found Vauxhall and managed to read Brixton all by herself to name a couple. All the way home on the train, she sat doing a wordsearch, which although she needed help with, she had a damned good go at first before she asked for help finding a phrase.
It's like all of a sudden, the penny has dropped, she's realised words are everywhere and she can read them. I am not sure she has ever realised this completely. It's so lovely to see - she's loving it and it's like she finally really knows she can do it and it's like a whole new world.
I don't know if your advice helped, but blogging about it helped me relax. I know, for a couple of days, I was worried about it, but I realised it was so much about my own experiences of school and my concerns that the same things might happen to her. She is definitely doing really well - the teacher confirmed that - and whilst I've not had chance to discuss her progress in depth as parents' evening has not happened just yet, I'm a lot happier than I was. My little girl is blossoming but at the same time, she's just being a little girl and not worrying about things that shouldn't concern a 5 year old. That's what mums are for.
If you took the time to comment or chat to me on Twitter, I really appreciate it. Whether you allayed my fears, empathised, suggested things or just asked questions, they all helped. That is the power of social media - you can share a problem and get a range of responses from people with different experiences and expertise that help you put it all into some kind of perspective, like putting together a jigsaw. It's all valuable.
So, from Missy Woo and from me, a big thank you.