Pushy parenting, or just encouraging?

It's a tricky balance. You want to encourage your child to do well, but equally you want them to turn out as a happy, relaxed, fun person to be around which is something that could be damaged if you push them too hard. It's an issue that's preying on my mind at the moment because Isabel seems to be really enjoying school, and is thriving, and I want to help her wherever I can. But it's early days, and I don't want her to feel that she comes homes from school only to have to do school stuff at home. At the moment I can get away with making it fun (playing "school", where she has to teach me, for example, or deliberately counting things wrong and letting her correct me, or asking her to count six apples into a bag in the supermarket). But she'll wise up to these tricks soon, so I need to work out a way to keep ahead, while still making sure she's engaged.

One of the reasons I'm thinking about this is that I already think she can do more at school than they're asking her to do. She's started bringing home reading books, but at the moment they have no words (I know, so they're not reading books, don't get me started....) - they're really discussion books where you have to discuss what might be happening. Seems at odds with what we're doing at home which is increasingly reading books with lots of words and sometimes no pictures at all. We just finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and are onto something by Dick King-Smith, who wrote The Sheep-Pig (aka Babe). She's loving them, and so are we, but it then seems odd to be going back to books with no words at all.

She certainly doesn't need help making up stories, that's her favourite game at the moment. Her response to me saying something like "come and put your shoes on, we're going out" is always "I need to finish my story!" - understandable, since it would be cruel to leave Barbie stranded and at the mercy of the dragon. Her response really reminds me of me as a child, whinging "I need to finish my chapter" when my mum was asking me to come and do something. It's the language that cracks me up as well - today I heard her saying "No I won't, retorted the prince" as part of a made up story. Retorted! Brilliant! A girl after my own heart.....