My 11 year old verbally gifted son with hypotonia and motor dyspraxia loved books, even as a baby. He started spelling and reading a year after he started walking. He especially liked Dr. Seuss's alphabet book and he made me read it to him so many times that I still have a lot of it memorized 10 years later. At 12 months he wanted me to pick him up so he could see the spice rack on our kitchen wall. He would point to each of the spices and wanted me to read the name and spell it for him. At 2 1/2 he identified the word jeep when my husband spelled it out for me, trying to keep the Christmas present a secret from our son. My son immediately said "Where's the jeep?" He wanted me to spell out more words for him while he was in the tub. He also read his first easy reader book by himself around that time and sometimes when he was still two, he would substitute the spelling for the word just for fun. For example, he would sometimes say I am a b-o-y and you are a g-i-r-l. When he started a musical theater class at 4 1/2, the much older kids would spell out words for him from their spelling lists or science books, trying to find words he couldn't identify. He got most of them right, especially what they thought were hard science words because his favorite book at that time was a science encyclopedia. He participated in a state pee wee spelling bee a few years ago for elementary aged kids after winning a county spelling bee. He is homeschooled and spelling, reading, and vocabulary are subjects I never had to worry about because he would learn those on his own by playing games he found on the internet or reading Wikipedia and always looking up definitions of words he had not heard before on online dictionaries.
