Interesting thread! My youngest taught herself the alphabet & sounds with the starfall app before 18 monhts (primarily car rides). At 2 she would point out letters while we were out, sometimes sounding out a little, we thought she'd keep going but her interests went elsewhere and we saw no reason to redirect our own personal cyclone back to learning to read at the ripe old age of 2. Two years later at 3.5yrs she's just now having an explosion of pre-reading skills, "[word] starts with..., like [otherword] starts with..." "[word] sounds like [otherword]" but she's more interested in getting us to tell her how to spell words than she is in trying to read books. I assume she'll read well before school though...
Ours is like that too, we find her passed out at night with a flashlight & a book when we go to bed! At 3.5 she recognizes a bunch of sight words and sounds out others, but she mostly likes to spell things back "Mommy, what does M-E-G-A-T-R-O-N spell?"
She's currently in a comic book phase and seems to really have an easier time reading them (she reads My Little Pony & The Amazing Spidergirl) than she does regular books.
Our biggest struggle has always been memorization, she started memorizing books likely before she could speak, because as soon as she could, she'd recite things we hadn't read in months! Because of this she won't even look at the words in her books, she'll just recite them - so we got her comics, which aren't as linear and make it so he has to actually LOOK at words to identify them.
She is currently in preK and at nap time each day she opts to read instead of sleeping (she's a terrible sleeper!) she writes "letters" to her friends by telling me what she wants to say, having me write it on a white board and then either typing it (a skill she's mastered) or handwriting it (a skill she's far from mastered). We aren't rushing her, and we take it to her level of interest, we almost read every night unless she's misbehaved and lost stories. I've found that the more casual I am about it, the better she does, she doesn't like pressure and she sometimes decides that she wants to "fit in" (my word, not hers) and purposely holds back because her friends can't do things, so we do our best not to make a big deal of specific things that set her apart because she's very sensitive to it!
