Agreed-- it isn't "hothousing" if the learner is eager and capable.
Also consider the following:
a) if you DO NOT 'teach' a child who is ready and interested in learning, they
will often find a way themselves. It may not be as pedagogically sound, either. (Whole language reading is definitely not as good an idea as phonetic learning, if one has a choice...)
b) kids that learn to read early and with great fluency
will never fully relate to same-age peers again until adulthood, and maybe not even then. Think about it. A child that is four and reading Mary Poppins for the first time is experiencing that work VERY differently than a nine-year-old child who is discovering that book. You only get to "discover" a book once, and the mental age at which it happens forever alters your perceptions of the story. My daughter, for example, will forever identify strongly with Anne Frank as "a girl just like me" rather than placing that work primarily in the larger context of Hitler's regime. Reading ahead of your peers changes things. It makes up part of the "gifted" experience of the world.
Neither of those things argues particularly strongly one way or the other.
I will say that I think Val is absolutely correct, though-- most of the people that dealt with my daughter up until she was about four really didn't go "Wow-- she's sure bright." It was more like head scratching and "Hmmm. That's odd."
They simply didn't have a context in which to place their observations. So it was "quirky" or "singular" behavior. Looking back on that, it is clear (now) that it was often that they'd simply never seen another EG/PG child up close.
It wasn't until she started demonstrating traditional academic skills like math and literacy that she started making strangers' eyes bug.
I definitely regret listening to the "professional teachers" in my own family that stridently insisted that teaching my then-eager 2yo to read would be "harming" her in some way. We waited until she was nearly four before formally approaching decoding skills with phonetically controlled material. It's obvious that
she was ready well before her second birthday, looking back;
we were the ones that weren't ready. LOL.
Methods that I think are entirely appropriate for little ones (<3) include magnetic letters, letter games (Peggy Kaye's Games for Reading is a gem of a book), and of course the Bob books if your child likes them, though mine preferred the slightly more snarky tone and full color illustrations of
Now I'm Reading instead. DD would remind me that "those come with stickers." LOL.
Oh, and we used Montessori methods, too-- tracing letters, etc. It was low-pressure and just plain fun.
