My child (6), before she learned reading for real, had a habit of "reading" things like toy instructions, or promotional fliers, etc... - we joked that she learned to read from my T-shirts :)
What puzzles me is that now, several years later, when she's a fluent and voracious reader and reading books above her grade level with ease, she STILL keeps several of these faux reading things in her room and once in a while "reads" them as a game (they are clearly NOT a source of information - she'd use the same ones for months before I throw them out as too dirty and she gets new ones).
First guess would have been that this is emulating a parent reading a newspaper - BUT we don't have any paper newspapers/magazines in the house, only electronic.
When questioned as to why she does this, she doesn't have any coherent explanation aside from "it's fun". Which is good enough for me but still leaves me with a giant "WHY!?!?!" in my head.
So, why would a child exibit such a peculiar behavior? When I recall myself at that age, I never "pretended" to read like that.