Unfortunately, you can't "un-learn" the way you learned to read.
Our son's "early reading" has kept me wondering "how" since the beginning.
He started reading words at two+ and would often "read" books. I quoted "read" because we never thought he was actually reading -- we figured it was just memorization, as he'd long been demonstrating a keen memory.
And then one day, shortly after turning three, he got a new book as a gift and promptly sat down and read it front to back. It was a 2nd grade book.
We were amazed and, naturally, had to try out this little guy's new found skills. He was reading just about anything we'd put in front of his face. He rarely, if ever, went through the process of sounding out words, and his fluency and expression were tremendous.
Where did this come from? We taught him the alphabet on the refrigerator, along with his name and things like that -- nothing else. We did read to him constantly, and he had a voracious appetite. Reading for a solid hour every night was common, if not typical. But how he made the connection between the spoken & written word is still a mystery. (We never followed along with our finger or anything like that.)
It wasn't long after that we started to switch off our reading, alternating a page or so at a time. What still stands out in my mind is the way he tackled new words -- he'd take a whole word approach based on (I'm assuming) similar words bouncing around his skull. When he pronounced a work incorrectly, I'd give him the correct pronunciation and that was that. He would rarely miss a word twice.
When he got into school, I remember that the whole process of phonics absolutely drove him batty. And when he had to do a whole page of marking the vowel and circling "special sounds," I thought he would totally lose it. (To this day, I still don't know the difference between a special and not-so-special sound.)
Sorry to drone on... our son is now nine and as we are enjoying a more typical language development with his sibling, I'm even more stunned by what he pulled off at such a young age.
