I never made a concerted effort to teach academic skills to my kids either. In fact, I subscribed to the notion that academic instruction before K could stifle the development of discovery learning. So, I didn�t teach, but did decorate their play room (dining room without furniture) with colorful and inexpensive posters from a school supply store, including the ABC�s and a number chart 1-100. They watched an hour or less per day of television, including Magic School Bus, some Discovery animal series, Wishbone and a few Muppet/ Sesame Street videos (a favorite was called Things that Go). We read to them every day.
They each sight read signs and grocery store items by around 18-24 months. They sight read Bob books and all level 1-2 early readers with ease before K. Even when they were reading beginner chapter books, I didn�t consider it �reading� because they usually could not sound out a word- they either knew it or didn�t, although they usually did know it. Not always though. In some cases, they would insert a different word starting with the same letter having a similar meaning.
My son had very formal phonics training from 1st-3rd grade, but it never �took� other than to do well on the assignments or tests. He never applied it to reading. My daughter started the same school and phonics program beginning in mid third grade and passed her assignments due to tutoring from he 1st grade brother as the coding was completely foreign to dh and me. After third, they each brained dumped the phonics coding.
Any oral reading assessment would surely yield average scores in comparison to reading comprehension tests. Nonsense word decoding and spelling also paint very average results. Yet they read very well, even orally now (since around 4th grade) as they have very strong vocabularies.
So, here I am going in for our beginning of the year K assesment conference, with my normal DD5. I will never forget the shock when that teacher told me that my child's reading level was almost that of a second grader and that she had already mastered K math! WHAT? I never taught her math and there is no way she can read. This teacher's crazy, I thought, we read to our child every night, I would know if my child could read. Well, aparently I was wrong, my daughter had indeed mysteriously learned to read sometime before K and had managed to keep it a secret.
As to when I realized they were actually reading, it is similar to your story. My daughter�s (first) K teacher was gushing about how well our almost 5 year old could read and then looked at me as if I were a terrible mommy when I seemed unimpressed. This was the catalyst for me to rethink my definition of reading.
On the flip side, when I volunteered in my daughter�s 1st grade class to work with the kids who could already read, I noticed at least two children who had near flawless and seemingly natural phonic decoding ability, but with much lower conceptual awareness than I expected.
I guess reading acquisition is one of the strongest indicators of learning style.
