Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Your child started reading when!

My DS2.9 loves to spell out the letters on EVERY single sign, book, poster, and tshirt and then ask me what it says. Needless to say I am exausted and I get a lot looks and comments when we go out. I often have people ask me how did I get him to do that. The answer is I did'nt, but I have recognized that this as a sign that he ready to shift into reading, so I am begining to teaching him sight words and how to sound out the phonics when we read.

I wanted to open up a forum where we could talk about our reading experiences. What did you do, if anything, to help your child shift into reading? When did you know your little youngster was ready to read or reading already? What was the strangest or funniest comment you ever received about your childs reading abilities.

I also must tell you a funny story about my now GD6. First I must tell you that I had never taught her anything in the way of ABC's or 123's, I always figured that was what school was for. haha I also never thought that she was more advanced than her peers. My child was smart but normal..
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.

Needless to say I have become a little more in tune with my children's abilities since then, and have been amazed ever since!

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.

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.

I love to talk about this one about DD6, My mom had given me those sponge letters, for her to play with in the tub. So at about 9 - 10 months she started asking "what this" and I told her, then we started playing find the letter. By the time she was a year she knew all her letters (and 1-10) At 14 months she spelled her name and asked me if that was her name. I had wooden letters in her room with her name spelled out so that's her learned it. At 18 months she was sitting at the kitchen table and all of a sudden said "Mommy, mommy begins with the letter "M" mmmmmmmmmmmmm" she understood phonics. After that she started reading street signs, street names and also became my back seat driver. "Mommy, how fast are you going, the speed limit is 45. What street are you looking for? We just pasted _____ street. At about 2 1/2 I figured out she had a reading vocabulary of over 500 words, so I put a book in front of her and she read 65 pages the first day. I don't know why I didn't do that earlier. As for when she started really reading I would have to say it was between 18 - 24 months.

The first time a stranger commented about her skills happened at a book store. The books at home were either too hard or too easy. So I had a lady at the store help. Another Mom overheard DD reading and when I was at the checkout she was telling me that it's a shame there aren't any good gifted schools in our area. It was the first time I had heard the term, and honestly I really didn't know the full meaning of what she was saying. The good news is that I do know now.

My dd at 18 mo knew letter names and sounds. She SO wanted to read that I did some googling and found www.headsprout.com. She did the first 3 lessons and that was pretty much it, she took off!! She did a few more lessons and was going faster than the program would allow and lost interest. By 2, she was on her way!! She is a great reader today, prefering nonficion medical books!

I discovered DD3 had ten or so sight words a few months after she turned two. I think she'd known the alphabet forever (i.e., before she could really talk). I didn't teach her deliberately, but she learned it. Of course when I discovered she had taught herself sight words I figured it was only a matter of time before she started reading, but it took longer than I thought it would. She didn't begin reading phonetically until very recently, but she's taken off in a big way. I think it's really interesting that she refuses to "sound out" words, and thus cannot read BOB books, but she is able to read words she's never heard or seen before. She is sounding them out, obviously, but for her it only works inside her head.

I have done _nothing_ to teach her, except read to her and occasionally let her play on my computer (mostly starfall).

I guess in retrospect, I should have figured something was up when she was less than two years old and refused to let me read her bedtime stories (e.g., Peter Rabbit)--because she had to recite them to me instead.

She doesn't read in public much (since she is very shy) but she has gotten some crazy looks from time to time. Nobody has said anything negative to us.

My DS6 started on numbers around 18 months, I think, and then letters, and was reading road signs and grocery store labels by the time he was 2. At 2 1/2, we moved across the country, and all there was to do in a U-Haul all day was read signs and his books and PowerTouch books, and he did that all the way. When we turned in the U-Haul, the lady was shocked that he read the brochure to her! It was a few weeks after that when I realized that he had a photographic memory and said "oh, that's how he does that!" He had asked about everything on the grocery list when I was writing it, and I told him the words, and about two weeks later he asked for crackers (his favorite meal, chickennuggetsketchuptomatoranchdressingandcrackersplease, all one word) and I went to get them out of the cabinet. He was watching, and he looked up and said "Ritz" and I said "yes, Ritz crackers" and he kept going, "light bulbs, toilet paper, toothpaste..." and I realized that he was reciting the grocery list from two weeks earlier! I went to tell my mom, and he tagged along, and when I left off at toothpaste, he filled in the next few items for her. We went to tell my brother, and when we got to the end of that, he filled in the next few items as well! That's when the light bulb went on in my head and I realized that every time I told him a word, it was stored in that photographic memory. He doesn't really show it that way anymore, and I'm afraid he may have lost the photographic quality, but he still remembers everything like a steel trap--as long as he reads it.
Anyway, by age 3, he could read literally anything--sounded out words he didn't know and everything. I never taught him any of it, just told him numbers and letters and words when he asked, and he figured out phonics on his own. His "word attack" score on the WJIII test last year was >21.9 years, which is as far as it goes, I believe. Comprehension runs well behind that, of course, because he has no life experience--but I told them, he could have gotten that same score two years earlier without ANY comprehension. He's always learned things before he knew what they meant--he knew how to count as high as you could listen to when he was 2, but he didn't know what numbers really were. Comprehension comes. And I'm probably off the subject again, *sigh* what was the question? LOL!

DD begged me to teach her to read when she was 3.5. So I did (using phonics.) She caught on very quickly and has been a voracious reader ever since.

DS seems to have learned to read from a LeapFrog video called "Letter Factory" when he was about 2.5. I used to let him watch it every morning when I was in the shower. One day we were playing with some magnetic letters at his preschool and I discovered he could read simple words.

One of the first things DD learned was letters. She had found a set of ABC block books and was obsessed with them. She would bring book after book to us to read and by 9 mths she knew all her letters and soon after the sounds they make. They say the average child in a middle class family is read to about 1000 hrs by the time they get into kindergarten and the lower income family by comparison read to the child about 25 hrs during the same time frame. My best friend brought that to my attention the last time we went to visit b/c she laughed and stated that DD has maxed out that 1000 hr mark already and she wasn't even 2 at that point. She was obsessed with books and the written word. She also has the ability to recite phrases back to you with no problems, my favorite story is three little pigs. She complained about wanting out of her carseat which got the response of not by the hair on my chinny chin chin. This brought a huge smile to her face with "Then I will hoof and I will poof and I will blow your house in said the wolf."

So with the memorization of phrases and quick pick up of ABCs I was not too shocked that sight words were next. We however have the child that doesn't really want to read and is more a sneaky reader and many a story on that one but through the examples that are numerous I know she is able to read but I really don't push it. When she is ready to sit down and read the book through then fine. But until that day comes I will let her be.

As for people's responses... I was on a trip visiting my best friend when she 'read' her first word to us so mouths dropped open and my friend was super excited that she witnessed it. Talking to another friend, competition raised it's ugly head since she has a daughter of the same age and I got a 'Oh she is memorizing which is the easiest form of reading' comment. Sure it is the beginning but she was also not even 2.

I now see signs that she is fully ready for phonics since her game here lately has been picking something in the room and sounding it out to then inform me what letter it starts with. So if she shows interest I might try phonics with her.

Nautigal,

I looked up photographic memory b/c we suspect DD has it. There really is no solid proof at this point but what I did find aligns with your comments... they believe photographic memory is something a select few are born with but grow out of it which might be why it is hard to study.

Ds was starting to read around 2 and half he is 3 and a half now. He may have been able to read before that but, he was also very speech delayed and didn't even start talking in sentences until just a couple months ago. I do know he knew his shapes at 11 mos. and his numbers (not rote) well before he turned two.

It does kind of suck not being able to spell anything out to other adults ha ha.

My DD4 was my earliest. She told me she wanted to learn how to read between 3 and 3 1/2. I wrote the word "cat" and she just sounded it out. She wanted lesson, so we started. I didn't have to give her nearly as much instruction as my other two, though. She amazed me at how quickly she could pick up something.

She's up to what seems to be a solid second grade level right now. I stopped lessons a while ago, yet she can read words using sound combinations I never taught her. sometimes she'll figure out a word, stop, and say "That word doesn't follow the rules" or "g next to e sounds like j here [orange]."

I see that others wrote "mine just reads whole words." She does this too, often the first time she reads them (not always; she inserts the wrong word sometimes, too). So tonight she got "growling" on sight, yet she also trips up on simple things (possibly because she's going too fast).


Here's one thing she trips on: sometimes she switches the words "I" and "A." Anyone else see this?

Val

We spell things in front of our kitties.

So the other night at bedtime, one of the cats was meowing. DS9 said "What does he want?" I was busy getting someone out of the shower, and so I said "I think he wants n-i-p (our cat-understandable word for catnip)."

Of course DD4 yelled "NIP!!!" and cat went barmy.

Val

What is a "2nd grade level" or a "first grade level"?

How are those terms defined by the child's reading ability (as opposed to the grade level of the book)?

I know this has been covered before, but I can't seem to find it in the archives.

Thanks.

I haven't noticed DD doing that. But she does have a few little funny things. Sometimes she reverses words or reads words out of order, which has me a bit worried (especially since her dad is dyslexic). She also does that thing where she reads faster than she can talk (I know because sometimes she looks up while finishing a sentence), and sometimes that is an issue when she is reading aloud.

I am a first grade teacher. Determining a reading level is based on assessment but you can get a ballpark idea and here are some suggestions. Of course, this is all based on my experience and others may disagree. In a classroom setting teachers consider students to be on level for instruction if they are reading a book at around 90 to 95% accuracy with very little support. Of course, they also should be able to read it fluently enough to understand what the story is about (fluency kicks in once kids are beyond the very early reader stage, when they have many more sight words). End of first grade level would be early chapter books (around Level 2ish) like Frog and Toad or Henry and Mudge. End of second grade level would be transitional chapter books like Magic Tree House or Junie B. There are many much more detailed lists of leveled books out there and I'm sure there are links to them on this site, but I generally tell parents that 90 to 95% accuracy (with comfortable fluency and comprehension!) means that it's about your child's level.

Our DS5 doesn't switch letters, but he completely ignores "an." If it says "an apple," he'll read "a apple." We've talked about why the n is there, but he's not interested.

I realized that my DS4 could read when he began picking words out of the newspaper at breakfast when he was 2 1/2. I hadn't done anything to teach him other than to read oodles of books to him and play word games while we were driving, which he loved. Once I discovered he was reading, I introduced him to Starfall.com, which seemed to solidify his understanding of phonics in just 1 or 2 sittings. By 3 he could read things like Frog and Toad without much trouble and was doing things like correcting my adult friend when she wrote "yea" as "yeah." He's 4 years 4 months now and reads Roald Dahl to me at night, with fluency and total comprehension. Comic books and graphic novels have been a great bridge to independent reading. He recently read a 200+ page Wizard of Oz graphic novel to himself and loved it.

My son was 2 1/2 when his dad told me that he was putting the j-e-e-p (my son's Christmas gift so he spelled it out for me) in the shed and my son told us he wanted to see the jeep. I realized that was an easy word so I started spelling out other words for him when he took his bath--things that he could see in the tub like soap, tub, water, etc. and he would point to whatever I spelled. He absolutely loved this game and he especially loved to play it for older kids who would spell words for him. They would give him the hardest words they knew how to spell--usually science words--and he would usually get them right because, after all, he liked to read science encyclopedias. He loved the attention. It seemed like he didn't even have to think about the words, he just knew what they were as soon as they were spelled. I remember one time when he was about 3 1/2, I showed his very bright 11 year old cousin how he could do this. I quickly spelled out words like curtain and window and he told me that my son was getting them faster than he could. He then spelled out words that I wasn't sure my son had ever read and he got those right too.

When he was preschool age, he didn't go to preschool, but he loved being read to from How it Works books and Aesop's Fables and books that I thought should have been above his ability to comprehend but he just loved learning new words and especially those with more than one meaning because he could use these when making up jokes.

His reading ability didn't matter, of course, when it came time for him to start kindergarten. He couldn't or wouldn't color in the lines and that was what the teacher wanted to focus on.

I bought an easy reader book for him when he was 2 1/2 that he had never seen before and he was able to read it.

At that time, I had never heard of two year olds reading and I had certainly not tried to teach him to read. All I did was read to him with my finger underneath the words as I read. He demanded to be read to a lot and one of his favorite books before he had even turned one was a Dr Seuss alphabet book and I still have that book memorized because I read it too him so much. He could identify some letters at 12 months.

My daughter was reading at 4 but she went to preschool and I think she must have learned to read there. I thought four was early and she did very well in elementary school. She fit in better than my son because she was smart but not too smart and she could draw and color in the lines beautifully, unlike my son, so she was the perfect student. I have to homeschool my son.

DD4 read her first word in front of me when she was 2.5. Right before she turned 3, she was reading some words and trying more. She is 4.5 and can read chapter books. It seems that it was gradual and then suddenly accelerated.

She is very verbal, but she is more math and physics oriented. She was not an early talker, but when she started, she zoomed. When she was about 20 months, people really noticed her verbal abilities, her clarity in speaking and her vocabulary was strong. And the reading was similar in the way she tackled it.
Slow, and then zoomed.

Ren

CFK... your son did not have a late start to anything. Your post just proves that all children learn in their own way and soar when they are ready. And it also proves that it really doesn't matter if your child reads at 2, 3 or 4. Reading early is not a prerequisite to being gifted.

CFK - I have a kid that didn't read until kindergarten either. But was reading things like the Warrior series and D'Auliere's book of Greek myths by summer following kindergarten. He passed up many of the kids that were reading in his K class that year.

Pre-K, he could assemble Lego sets for 12 year olds and conceptually understood things like square roots. I thought he had to be really reading pre-k to be "really" gifted. It really is a function of many factors on when kids (ND & GT) gain these skills.

Right now (2nd grade), he's reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Thanks for all the book suggestions! I have to admit, I love Dan Brown books. I can't wait for the Angels and Demons movie to come out. I hope it's not a disappointment!

DS4 was "0 to 60" on math this year, but he's not really reading yet. (He's sounding out words, but he's not fluent with reading. In contrast, DS7 was reading chapter books by this age.) He had a similar explosion with writing 6mos. before that. Within 36 hours, he went from writing squiggles at best, to handwriting that looked like his big brother wrote it. It just seems to be his M.O. I'm suspecting that he's a visual-spatial learner, since that's the way they often do things: not necessarily early, but all at once when they do get them.

6mos. ago I wasn't sure DS4 was GT. But his math explosion tells me that he probably is. He's just differently GT.

He goes to K next year. I am awaiting a reading explosion in the next couple of years. We shall see...

MOM2boys -

Thank you for this explanation. My DSalmost5 is similar to Kriston's DS in that he is sounding out words but is not fluent yet.
So I guess that is just "early reading" or prereading and not at a particular level.

He has a great speaking vocabulary, comprehension when listening, and capacity for language in general.

I guess I will have to be patient and see if he progresses quickly (exploding as some others have) or develops his reading skills at a more moderate pace.

EW

DS6 started recognizing sight words before 2 and knew all his letters and sounds before 2 -- we had alphabet letters and magnets, but didn't do anything very taxing; he just kind of knew them one day. We didn't keep leveled readers because I didn't find them particularly stimulating, so he mainly learned from all the picture books we had around -- I'm a picture book fanatic . I did eventually spring for a really cheap Dora phonics set (he was a Dora nut) when he was about 2.5, but it was kind of a waste -- he was through them before he was 3!

When he was that age, he had a few books that really piqued his reading curiosity; "Freight Train" was one, "Elmer," "Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom," "Good Night Mooon." And he had a "Construction Trucks A-Z" book that really did it for him. Word books, like the Richard Scarry ones, were also *very* popular at our house.

Since I worked and went to school when he was that age, we didn't read particularly a lot at home; he was at daycare for most of the day, but we did read religiously before bed. He started to get "quiet reading time" before bed just before he turned 3, and he studied those books for at least an hour every night before he went to sleep.

By 3.25 or so he could easily read a Frog and Toad independently, and was reading picture books like the dickens. My "lightbulb moment" was when he was about 3.5 -- we arrived at a Target store and I said, "We're at Target!" using the "French" pronunciation, "tar-jhey." Ds said, "No, Mama, that says "targeT!" -- emphasizing the T. At that point I started to dabble on gifted boards.

He started to read Captain Underpants books silently when he was 4.25, and that's when I realized that maybe this was a more than a little unusual! He was evaluated at a local university for an enrichment program and scored at a mid-second grade level at 4y7m -- 99 percentile compared to mid-year kindergartners. He started K reading Beverly Cleary books. When fully tested in K, his grade equivalent was mid-fifth grade.

Nowadays, ds-almost-7 is more into Calvin and Hobbes and non-fiction than he is into novels. If there's no other option, though, he'll blow through a kid's novel in less than an hour -- he read the first 6 books in "A Series of Unfortunate Events" in less than an hour and a half each. He read "How to Steal a Dog" at a weekend work event for me in about an hour.

I like reading all these stories -- it's fun to stroll down memory lane! And I agree with the others; kids who read very early are almost always GT; kids who are GT don't always read early.

Exactly! And even though my DS6 CAN read anything, he isn't interested in reading anything except his Rocks and Minerals book, things about math and numbers, and occasionally some of his "kid" books such as Detective LaRue, Frog and Toad, Garfield, and a few others. I would dearly love for him to be interested in H2G2 or Crichton or any of the thousands of books that I love, but he just doesn't want to read those yet.
Ability doesn't even translate into interest!

Hmmm, Boo (5 y.o.)started reading signs, T-Shirts and short Bob-style books around 13 mos. old. She was reading Frog and Toad are Friends and other books by Arnold Lobel by the time she was 18 mos. and it just went from there.

At 16 mos. of age I noticed her adding and subtracting in quantities of up to 10. Now at 5 she's pretty good at math when she wants to be. I call it practical math. For example, when we are at the store and she wants to know if she has enough money to purchase something she can figure out the price, including sales tax, if she has enough money, how much more she will have to save up(or convince her brother to let her borrow) if she is short on cash, or how much she will have left over in her head in about a minute.

I can't tell if her brother, Racer (3 y.o.), is reading yet. He might be as he can tell me about books I have never read to him and I found him enthralled with a joke book the other day. He was muttering one of the punchlines to himself and giggling up a storm. I asked Boo if she had read it to him and she said, "He probably read it himself". He seems to be a strong visual-spatial learner. He can see a puzzle put together once and put it together on his own after that.

Although he generally requires knowing what the end product is supposed to look like first. His sister is quite similar in that regard but he has a knack for mechanical things and building. He always seems to know where something should go for maximum support/benefit/whathave you. His number sense is fairly strong, too.

I couldn't agree with this statement more, Nautigal.

DD (now 4.5) started reading at the age of 2. She never learned phonics ... she just simply taught herself to read. And within a couple of months, she could read almost anything. I'll never forget the look on the pediatric dentist's face when she handed dd (then 3) a sample tube of toothpaste and dd said, "Look, Mom ... this has cavity protection - and fluoride!"

DD uses her reading skills to gain information. But she seldom picks up a book to read herself. She does enjoy being read to at night and she loves listening to chapter books on cd ... she'll retell the story, so I know she appreciates the plot and intricacies of some good fiction. But even though she's a strong reader ... I'm at a loss as to how to get her to love reading.

My daughter was a non-fiction reader until she met Harry Potter. Now, she is ignoring us. She is interested mostly in math and science.

It always cracks me up because her reading scores were always high, but she did not like to read. We read books as a family. She constantly looked up things.

She is so into Harry Potter and the vocabulary and the spells. She was even late into this (due to her sensitivity issues). Most of her friends in elementary school were reading them in third grade and she got hooked in sixth.

Ah! That reminds me of my ds, about 5 at the time, wasn't interested in reading the word 'the' or getting it as a sight word.
He thought it was inconsequential or somesuch!
Finally I just had him hold a piece of paper and a hole punch while I read a favorite story.. He had to punch the paper whenever I read 'the'. He ended up with a very small amount of paper left at the end of this story. He really seemed to get ok with 'the' after that.

DS5 knew sight words at 2, but before his 3rd birthday, he started reading books to us. At first, I thought it was just his memory (we read the same ones over and over again), but when he picked out a book we hadn't read yet and read almost every word, we were shocked. He sounds out words and uses words in the sentence to figure out words he doesn't know.

Our son started reading letters, numbers colors and shapes at around 9-10 months old. He would grab the correct letter/number in the color we asked and would also bring us toys that start with that letter. Shortly after he turned 2 he started guessing the words after spelling them and he also started writing. Then around 2.5, he learned letter sounds from a toy. Right after that, he read words, then sentences, then books. His writing developed a little bit slower. His penmanship improved a lot at age 3 and at 4 he taught himself to write in cursive. We are both very busy parents and never sat with him to actually teach him anything like what most people accuse us of doing. We only support him by answering his questions and buying him toys and materials that he is interested in. We rarely read to him because he actually hated being read to. Although he is a very good reader, reading is just not his favorite activity.

DS6 was one of those kids who just kind of always had an intense feel to him...I remember holding him on my lap at a summer meeting at my old school when I was a teacher and he was about 1.5 years old. He sat for over an hour going through book after book that I had in a basket for him. Several teachers made comments about how intense he was in looking through the books. He showed a massive interest in letters around age 2 and had them learned by age 3. He would yell out signs and such as he drove down the road. As an ex-Kindergarten teacher, I was the wacked mom when I saw he was interested in what everything was at age 2 that I "labeled" our house like I labeled my classroom. So he would gleefully run from room to room "reading" all the labels. He used to love sitting at the computer at age 3 and would ask us to find videos of his favorite things (school buses, trains, fire engines...) it got to the point that I just made him word cards with his favorite things on them and he knew how to get onto yahoo and would use his word cards and type the words into the search engines, he would use the mouse to choose which video he wanted to watch and he would just navigate his way around on the computer while we just sat and watched in awe. He was able to read beginning books by age 4 and now at age 6 the reading resource teacher at the local school helped us figure out that he is reading on a 5th grade level right now....but he has never learned phonetically -he just knows the words by sight...once he is told a word usually once, he just seems to remember it.

I like this! I'll track down an "a" book and try it with the n's in "an" - maybe I can tell him he's letting all the n's escape and he's got to capture them...

I couldn't find it either, though I remember reading it.

I use two methods:

1. DD4 likes to read from a 2nd grade textbook DS7's teacher let him take home.

2. I look up books on the Accelerated Reader book finder. It's not perfect, but it gives me a ballpark idea. Here's a link:

AR Book Finder

Val

my MG (?) DS7 did not read early , but when he started reading at the end of kindergarden he went from "snowmen at night" (K level) books to Harry Potter, Dinotopia, middle school level books in about 8 months. His speech was similar. Speech Delay until 3 1/2, then incredibly fast speech development.

My HG DD4 is still not really reading but at her third birthday was sounding out three and four letter words. Only to stop and become disinterested as she became much more interested in Math. I am thinking she will be a reading "burst" kid like my son as well when she hits first grade.

irene