I have hothouse envy. My DD4.5 would never submit to it so even if I do get passing urges to see what I can teach her, she likes to be in control and keeps me in check.

My DD4.5 began reading when she was 2 and a half. How did I teach her? Well, we read all the time. She couldn't get enough of books. I bought magnetic letters that said their letter sounds when she was 1.5 and she learned all the letter sounds in less than a week and how to recognize upper and lower case letters and then never touched the letters again. She started asking me to spell out words for her. This is how she was teaching herself. I wrote some words for her and they became sight words, then suddenly I realized she had a ton of sight words. I got excited and got some flashcards (my only experience with them). I showed her the card, and she already knew it or could learn it seeing it once or twice. The cards were put on the shelf as useless. I never used a single flashcard again. She just didn't need it and rebelled against them anyway. She would not let me teach her to read. She wanted to do the entire thing her way. She was learning behind the scenes, but not showing me. She would accidentally read over my shoulder, or when she forgot to hide it, but didn't like to read too much aloud to me. When she finally read an entire longer book to me, it had long paragraphs and complex vocabulary (at 3). It brought tears to my eyes because she had only been giving me glimpses along the way of how much she knew.

Oh, the early reading, writing, drawing, storytelling, spelling, advanced vocabulary, math skills yadda yadda yadda didn't help her pre-k to truly see her gifts or to work with them anyway. Others have had better luck.

Now I have a DD who will be three soon and things are different. She easily learned letter names and sounds before two, knows how to spell a few things, knows a few sight words and can be coaxed to sound a few things out, but she is not in the same place as my DD 4.5 was at her age. She is a bright child, in fact, people comment on it all the time, but she doesn't have some of the things that really shocked me with my first: early reading, advanced drawing, early writing and spelling, amazing memory, and more facility with numbers before three. She (my younger child) is more empathetic, has more commonsense, is more coordinated, and has less quirks so she certainly has her strengths.

I do have urges to really teach the younger one to read, but don't want to push too much. Everyone thinks I have some master secret because my older child read so early, but I just lucked out.

It will be interesting to see how they both grow and change.