I'm really smiling at some of the anecdotes others have shared. Oh my goodness, DD was annoyed by the phonemic awareness drills in K-2. She regarded that as a COMPLETE waste of her time-- time that she could have been investing in, you know-- actually reading.
LOL.
Looking back, while we
say that DD learned to read when she was four...
that's probably not entirely accurate. She had a significant number of sight words before then. She also had complete phonemic awareness from the time she was... well, I'm not even sure. 18-20 months, certainly.
She certainly understood symbolism from that time as well-- that is, that symbols could be representational and have other meanings.
Anyway. We mentally note her "reading" milestone from the time that she was:
a) choosing to read by herself
b) decoding accurately (I mean at least 95% accuracy)
c) reading novel material accurately
d) grasping plot, sequence, etc. in read material-- to the point that she could accurately answer inferrence questions about that material or summarize it for an observer.
She never liked reading aloud, and I think we just handed her the 'key' by showing her phonemic 'stringing' as it were (which she had been asking for for over a year-- and us refusing on the advice of my mother, a primary teacher with bias against early reading), and within a few weeks, she had jumped from CVC controlled readers to second or third grade material and beyond.
It's that quantum jump that we refer to as "learned to read." I think that most parents-- maybe even most parents here?-- would have said that our DD was 'reading' by the time she was three. She certainly recognized signage and words in newspaper headlines and such before that. We just weren't sure how much of that was memorization-and-matching versus decoding in that novel sense. She seemed to understand CONTEXT during all of this, however. So the word "cat" might mean a generic housecat, OUR cat, the illustration in a book, or a big cat at the zoo in the newspaper... was that 'reading'? I really can't say, I guess. She could certainly converse in great detail about reading selections right from the beginning, and asked perceptive questions which required some understanding of print prior to that 'reading' milestone (at four).
Our benchmark was rejection of the null hypothesis, if you will.
