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

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