I say "my child self-taught reading at 2" and usually that's specific enough; if people want more detail, I explain what happened, which was:
- we noticed he could read the odd word when he was 18 months, which as it happened was before he could talk :-) (He recognised and pointed out DVD on an advertisement for a DVD that didn't have a picture of one, which we thought was odd; so we wrote DVD and his name and several other words of the same kind of general length and shape, spread them out and asked "which one says DVD? which one says Colin?" which he could show us very convincingly.)
Of course, I don't really know how much he could read at that point, it was hard to tell!
- he knew all the letters by sound and name by the time he could articulate the sounds
- by 2y1m a favourite game was to say "M mmmm Mummy" etc. with different words, and I remember the nursery staff being amazed by that, and myself being amazed that he could even do it with words that I was sure he hadn't met on Starfall
- during the next months he gradually got better at reading words, and would "read" familiar books with a lot of help from memory. We used to do "I'll read one sentence and you read the next". It was hard to tell how much was reading and how much memory.
- by 2y6m he was spelling obsessed
- at 2y10m we were at a school open day and he picked up a story book of the kind you give 5/6yos and read the whole thing, maybe 15 pages; that was when I really understood that he could read books, not just remember what he'd heard
If he hadn't reached this last point before his third birthday, I suppose it might have been more difficult to decide what to say, because really his early learning to read was clandestine!
