There is nothing I could do to make my older son read before spring break of K...he got it when he got it....and conversely there was nothing I could do to slow down my younger son. When I would tell him this is enough for today he went off on his own. I couldn't get rid of all the text/signs/words he ran into in his daily life and when he demanded I let him read to me at night there was no stopping him. Sure I could have stopped visiting the library and supplying him with new books but the bazillion books we already owned were still there. I could have done dishes or folded laundry instead of listening but he would have read to me while I did chores.
When my children where younger I used to tell people that by my definition a child was a reader (vs. an emerging reader) when they can't help but help but read everything around them. Words are not something to decode anymore. My older DD wasn't there till 7, while my son hit this by 4. You couldn't stop him from reading, anything and everything around him. Having had kids on two ends of the spectrum gives me an interesting perspective. It's not just at what different ages they hit this milestone, but at how quickly they moved from sounding out simple words to reading without having to think about it. In the case of my two kids is exactly the opposite of the two in the article, the slower reader was the one with comprehension problems.
