The reason my son wouldn't read very much at 4 was because his eyes got tired and lost focus after a very short time and I didn't know there was a problem until he was 7. At his 4 yr old checkup, he showed two doctors how he could name all the words in the first several sentences in a book (probably somewhere between 3rd & 4th grade level) that he hadn't seen before when I spelled out the words for him, but he wouldn't just read it for them. Ages 5-7, he seemed to be able to read at a high level but would only read maybe a paragraph if that much and then he wanted me to do the reading, unless it was double spaced and larger print. At age 5, he read one-page reports (always double-spaced) to go along with his letter of the week show & tell in Kindergarten that usually came up around 6th-8th Flesch Kincade grade level on Microsoft Word. He read a report on his GPS that came up 12th grade level but he missed a few words on that one when he read it to the class.
He said reading gave him a headache. When he had his first vision exam, they didn't think he had a vision problem because he could see everything on the eye chart, but I knew something was not right because I thought if he could already read well that he would be reading more by himself instead of wanting me to read to him all the time. His developmental pediatrician was the first to notice the vision focusing problem and sent us to a developmental optometrist who confirmed that my son did have a problem. Even though my son couldn't have practiced reading very much because of this vision problem, at age 7, he was able to read a paragraph from an article in Time magazine, but he kept losing his place and skipping lines. He did not make any errors or lose his place in his reading when he had a finger underneath the words as he read. About a year after he had vision therapy, he willingly read entire Wikipedia articles out loud to me.
I really think playing computer and video games are what motivated my son to keep reading even though he had a vision focusing problem that made reading more difficult for him and gave him a headache. Also, I think being in a musical theater group with kids of all ages where he had to read lines and song lyrics with older kids helped.
He used to love Brain Quest and we always had to get the ones several grade levels ahead of his age. We sometimes took Brain Quest with us when we went to a fast food restaurant and somebody would usually ask me where we got it because my son got so excited over answering some of the questions and he was obviously having fun with it. Some of his older gifted friends are involved in Quiz Bowl at the public school and I feel kind of sad that he can't do this with them, but we watch Cash Cab and Who Wants to be a Millionaire and sometimes Jeopardy together and he enjoys that. I think trivia games for trivia loving kids is a great motivation for learning. My son got his first Trivial Pursuit game at 4 and he liked to ask me the questions. He discovered that I wasn't as smart as he thought I was when he got that game. I used to call him "... Smarty Pants" so he called me "Lori Genius." I lost my status as Lori Genius when he got that game. I couldn't get away with making up some of the answers that I didn't know when he asked me questions all day long. The answers were on the back of the card.
One of the few books that he would sometimes read to other people was a coloring book with jokes in it that we bought at a dollar store. He never wanted to color in it though. I never could motivate him to color in the lines and this was a problem at our public school where coloring is still required in 6th grade, according to one of my son's public schooled friends. The Kindergarten teacher wanted my son to go to a transitional first grade after Kindergarten (a year in between Kindergarten and First Grade) even though he was reading at a very high level and doing math above grade level, because he wouldn't color in the lines, but I am doing my "duty as a parent" as another teacher at the school called it, by homeschooling my son.
