Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school How did your child start reading?

DS (almost 2.5!) knew all upper and lower case letters by 18 months. He could figure out words in context in the simple baby books before 2. Around 2 I noticed he knew his phoenetic sounds though I'm not sure where he learned that skill. He could identify sounds both ways. Ex: If I said M he would say mah mah Mommy! Marble! Milk! And if I said "Desk" he could identify is started with a D. I never really asked him to identify sounds in other parts of words because it never occurred to me to ask.

Recently all the baby books have returned to the play space because our new DS is here! DS2 will get these books and spend hours spelling the words to himself while pointing to each letter. Yesterday he spelled the word penguin a lot. Ha. I have also noticed that he has all the Level 1 Thomas the Train books we own memorized. I don't mean he knows most words or gets the gist of the paragraph, I mean he literally can recite this big stack of books word for word as he turns the pages. I don't think he is reading but I do suspect he is recognizing some common words in these books. I was rather shocked because he managed to memorize them all in the span of about a week and Level 1 is usually a normal Kindergarten level I think. I could be wrong on that. It's the step up from "Ready to Read."

He has also been randomly spelling some of his most favorite words for several months, like his name and Mommy, Daddy, and now brothers name.

I don't want to push him to read at this point. If he keeps doing his thing will he read on his own?

DS was similar at that age: memorized books; spelled phonetic words such as tomato, polenta, etc; knew a lot of sight words including lengthy relatively uncommon words e.g. flamingo. I picked up a second hand phonics book thinking he'd be able to use it 6+ months down the line. His eyes lit up when he saw it, we read it together once, and he was suddenly reading. I think he just needed the key to help him with decoding.

He did insist for a long time that only phonetic pronunciation was correct - we had lots of arguments about how rule-breaking words *should* be said vs. how they were actually pronounced. His reading vocabulary was far larger than the spoken vocabulary that was typically used in his environment. But at 5 he gracefully accepts correction.

DS didn't start to read until age 6. I was told by the school that he was behind in reading so I taught him myself. Once it clicked he really took off. He's now in 4th grade and reads at an 8th grade level.

I think it is very variable. There are so many different things to master. Mine was able to decode early but it took years that she liked reading chapter books. It was clearly vision related, she still does not enjoy books with tiny text but usually in our library there are different editions of the same book so we'll get the one with largest letters. Same happened with note reading.

My ODD is 8. She was fascinated with letters at 1, knew all the letters in english before she turned 2 and had several sight words. She started reading simple phonetic words around 2.5. We moved to a nonenglish speaking country when she was 3. She was really frustrated that she could not decode that language same way than english and stopped reading for few months. Then before she turned 4 she learned to read very well in our other language. While she was able to read some in english she was missing some skills so at 6 we went through "teach you child to read in 100 lessons" book (only took 2 weeks). She was almost 7 when she really liked reading books alone, before that she would get tired fast. Now at 8 she reads our other language really well and english 5-6th grade level. She does not speak native level english so the problem is her limited english vocabulary rather than decoding skills.

Funny thing is that she never learned letter names in our phonetic language. She still knows them in english and she must have zoned out when they were teaching them in school.

Ours didn't start reading fluently until 6.5... but jumped almost immediately to a 4th or 5th grade level once it clicked for him. His comprehension was also sky high.

Every kid truly is different.

Our DD didn't start reading until about 6.5 from what I remember.

She could sight read a few words and certainly convinced us that she could read before that. I discovered to my horror that we had been fooling us one Saturday morning. I sat down with her and spent about a tear filled hour with; I knew that she knew the letters and their sounds so I showed her how to 'sound' the words out, explaining some exceptions like 'th' and 'sh' etc, every time I saw her guess I made her go back to the top of the page and start again. It was a very short book about a boy and his red dog and I felt like Dr Mengele for persisting but something inside told me to continue.

A light must have switched on in her head because after that morning she took off like a rocket, Egyptology became an obsession, Greek mythology came next, she descended on the Percy Jackson books like the wolf upon the fold and by her 7th birthday had read the Harry Potter series too as well as the Hobbit.

As I have related before, I convinced myself that I was the Ultimate Reading Teacher until about 18 months later when we had to get our DD tested and we discovered her DYS level LOG - which literally sublimated, in the physical sense, my hubris there.

Sounds like he's close to reading on his own now.

My DS11 was reading at 2.5 without being taught. He'd always loved being read to, so we kept stacks of books around and read and read and read. At the time, I didn't know that 2-year-olds were capable of reading and I figured he'd learn to read in kindergarten years later with everyone else. Then, out of the blue at breakfast one morning, he read words from a newspaper article on coal mining, and I about fell off of my chair. He quickly went from that to reading easy readers cover to cover. By kindergarten (early start at 4.5), he was reading at a 4th grade level. This had us more than a little freaked out for years, but it's all good!

I'd just keep reading to your son and let him make of it what he will. At that age, our DS also loved the Starfall site and word play--puns, rhymes and homonyms--anything involving words. Also, don't be afraid to read things that would seem to be way over his head. They'll surprise you!

My DS7 was similar in that age too. He taught himself the alphabets and was obsessed with them. He would say them forward and backward before he was three. He was able to spell and read simple books around that age too. However, he's more fascinated with the words than reading a book. He loves word games such as word search and Rebus. But he doesn't like to read books. We get books from library all the time for DS8 and him. DS8 reads pretty much everything (fiction or nonfiction) but DS7 would only read books that he's interested like riddles or jokes.

I'd say have your DS keep reading different books. He'll learn not only words but other things that books can teach him. Please also keep in mind that your DS maybe able to read words, but you'll need to know how much he understands it. Comprehension is a very important part of reading. My DS7 was brought down one level in K year by his teacher to enhance his comprehension before moving on to the higher levels.

DS always loved being read to. At not-quite-two I heard him chatting to himself, then realized it had cadence, then realized it sounded familiar. I peeked around the corner to see him reciting How The Grinch Stole Christmas, turning the pages at the appropriate time. He knew all his letters and sounds. But he didn't actually read. Halfway into first grade I was getting ready to ask his teacher about his lack of reading ability, when "click" he was off and running.

As George said, it's really so many variables that it's hard to know. It sounds like all of the readiness pieces are there-- but the ability to meld them together and decode/comprehend is a different kind of cognitive task, IME.

DD never really did that on her own. I think that she wasn't sure what the "magic" step was, and so she assumed that there was more to "reading" than there really was-- so she never took it on her own.

She stayed at about the level you describe for two years.

She was starting to use whole language (sight memorization) instead of "decoding" phonetically, and my mom (an elementary reading specialist with severe dyslexia) told us to intervene and teach her decoding instead. So we did, using leveled readers.

It took about four sessions, I think. She almost immediately transitioned to hours of sustained silent reading, jumped reading levels at a rate that boggled the mind (still does, really)-- she went from BOB books to Harry Potter in about six months. Not sure-- it was less than that, probably, because I only found out about the Harry Potter because it disappeared from the shelf and I found her with it late one night in her bed. She's voracious and has plowed her way through thousands of books in the 10+ years since. She went from "not really reading yet" to at least a middle school level of reading proficiency and speed within a few months.

She was, early on in that period, polishing off books like MTH and Cam Jansen at a rate of one every couple of hours.

She was five then, but had been taught with those phonetically controlled readers for a couple of weeks while she was still four.

It's really, really hard for me to say how long it would have taken her if we'd done nothing at all. I simply don't know. I do know that it opened an entire world of joy for her, and I can't really think why we didn't do it sooner, honestly. Reading has given her an enormous positive method of coping with being so different, an escape from her worries and troubles, etc. I have exactly zero regrets that she didn't learn to read "in school" with most other children. It made OUR lives easier, too, because it was a quiet and unobtrusive way to keep her brain "fed" in almost any situation, with most outsiders being none the wiser.




ETA: The other thing about reading independently is that it gives the child a level of autonomy and agency that they otherwise lack. That is, if it's print, THEY can decide whether to access it for themselves. That's very powerful for some children, and my DD was one of them. She no longer needed to find an adult to provide her with stories from books, ask permission to read, etc. It was HERS.