My son read his first easy reader book at 2 1/2 without being taught to read, could identify words that were spelled out for him orally, and he liked to spell words like boy, girl, and stop instead of saying the actual word, just for fun, at age 2 1/2. He would read for me a little and he would read for other kids (he loved doing this because he got a lot of attention from them by reading or naming words they spelled for him) but he still would tell his dad and other adults he couldn't read.
At three he loved Aesops Fables and Grimms Fairy Tales and the dictionary. At four he loved "how it works" type books and encyclopedias and the adult National Geographic.
We also watched him on the computer before he turned three and we knew there was no way he could do some of the things he did without being able to read, so at three we bought him Reader Rabbit First Grade and he really seemed to enjoy it and had no trouble at all doing it.
But he wouldn't read much for me, maybe a sentence from each page and that was it and he wanted me to read the rest to him. He would name the words if I spelled the words out loud while he looked away from the page so I knew he could read them if he could do that and I thought it was strange. The month my son turned four, I told the doctor about this and he listened to me spell out the words from a book. My son instantly identified the words but still refused to read from the book. The print was kind of small and there were a lot of words on each page. I asked the doctor if there might be something wrong with his eyesight but the brief vision test they gave my son didn't show any problems. At nine, he still doesn't need glasses.
At 4 1/2 he started a musical theater class and he had no trouble reading the White Rabbit lines from Alice in
Wonderland (maybe 5th grade level?) and songs from Babes in Arms, but all of it was double spaced and he had to have a finger under the words as he read or he would lose his place. He was the youngest kid in the class by several years and all the other kids were reading, so he read. Nobody had told him that he wasn't supposed to be able to read yet. He hadn't started Kindergarten and he didn't go to preschool, so probably assumed all kids could read.
At five, the Kindergarten teacher let him read one page double-spaced reports that I typed for him to go along with his letter-of-the-week show & tell. I did not worry about the reading level of the reports because there were usually only a few words that he didn't know, if any, and he only needed to see them once to remember them. I later typed one of them using Microsoft Word and it showed 12th grade Flesch-Kincade grade level, but most were probably 6th grade level.
I did not think he could possibly have a problem with vision since he was able to read at such an advanced level--but he did. He had trouble with tracking and his eyes would tire easily. We didn't discover this until he was seven. Vision therapy helped with some of it but I still don't think he can read as much as other kids without his eyes getting tired, yet I think his reading level and comprehension are probably better than his gifted friend who is several years older who reads all the time. This friend, who is in the public school gifted program, used to ask me about my son's IQ and wanted to know how my son knew so many words that he didn't even know.
I have thought a lot about this. Maybe it is because I continued to read to him. He still likes the adult National Geographic and I have noticed that some of their writers use metaphor and advanced vocabulary and he picks up a lot of vocabulary this way. He also got in the habit of looking up stuff on Wikipedia and since one link always leads to another, I think he might end up doing more reading than I think he does.
