Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Your child started reading when!

CFK - I have a kid that didn't read until kindergarten either. But was reading things like the Warrior series and D'Auliere's book of Greek myths by summer following kindergarten. He passed up many of the kids that were reading in his K class that year.

Pre-K, he could assemble Lego sets for 12 year olds and conceptually understood things like square roots. I thought he had to be really reading pre-k to be "really" gifted. It really is a function of many factors on when kids (ND & GT) gain these skills.

Right now (2nd grade), he's reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Thanks for all the book suggestions! I have to admit, I love Dan Brown books. I can't wait for the Angels and Demons movie to come out. I hope it's not a disappointment!

DS4 was "0 to 60" on math this year, but he's not really reading yet. (He's sounding out words, but he's not fluent with reading. In contrast, DS7 was reading chapter books by this age.) He had a similar explosion with writing 6mos. before that. Within 36 hours, he went from writing squiggles at best, to handwriting that looked like his big brother wrote it. It just seems to be his M.O. I'm suspecting that he's a visual-spatial learner, since that's the way they often do things: not necessarily early, but all at once when they do get them.

6mos. ago I wasn't sure DS4 was GT. But his math explosion tells me that he probably is. He's just differently GT.

He goes to K next year. I am awaiting a reading explosion in the next couple of years. We shall see...

MOM2boys -

Thank you for this explanation. My DSalmost5 is similar to Kriston's DS in that he is sounding out words but is not fluent yet.
So I guess that is just "early reading" or prereading and not at a particular level.

He has a great speaking vocabulary, comprehension when listening, and capacity for language in general.

I guess I will have to be patient and see if he progresses quickly (exploding as some others have) or develops his reading skills at a more moderate pace.

EW

DS6 started recognizing sight words before 2 and knew all his letters and sounds before 2 -- we had alphabet letters and magnets, but didn't do anything very taxing; he just kind of knew them one day. We didn't keep leveled readers because I didn't find them particularly stimulating, so he mainly learned from all the picture books we had around -- I'm a picture book fanatic . I did eventually spring for a really cheap Dora phonics set (he was a Dora nut) when he was about 2.5, but it was kind of a waste -- he was through them before he was 3!

When he was that age, he had a few books that really piqued his reading curiosity; "Freight Train" was one, "Elmer," "Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom," "Good Night Mooon." And he had a "Construction Trucks A-Z" book that really did it for him. Word books, like the Richard Scarry ones, were also *very* popular at our house.

Since I worked and went to school when he was that age, we didn't read particularly a lot at home; he was at daycare for most of the day, but we did read religiously before bed. He started to get "quiet reading time" before bed just before he turned 3, and he studied those books for at least an hour every night before he went to sleep.

By 3.25 or so he could easily read a Frog and Toad independently, and was reading picture books like the dickens. My "lightbulb moment" was when he was about 3.5 -- we arrived at a Target store and I said, "We're at Target!" using the "French" pronunciation, "tar-jhey." Ds said, "No, Mama, that says "targeT!" -- emphasizing the T. At that point I started to dabble on gifted boards.

He started to read Captain Underpants books silently when he was 4.25, and that's when I realized that maybe this was a more than a little unusual! He was evaluated at a local university for an enrichment program and scored at a mid-second grade level at 4y7m -- 99 percentile compared to mid-year kindergartners. He started K reading Beverly Cleary books. When fully tested in K, his grade equivalent was mid-fifth grade.

Nowadays, ds-almost-7 is more into Calvin and Hobbes and non-fiction than he is into novels. If there's no other option, though, he'll blow through a kid's novel in less than an hour -- he read the first 6 books in "A Series of Unfortunate Events" in less than an hour and a half each. He read "How to Steal a Dog" at a weekend work event for me in about an hour.

I like reading all these stories -- it's fun to stroll down memory lane! And I agree with the others; kids who read very early are almost always GT; kids who are GT don't always read early.

Exactly! And even though my DS6 CAN read anything, he isn't interested in reading anything except his Rocks and Minerals book, things about math and numbers, and occasionally some of his "kid" books such as Detective LaRue, Frog and Toad, Garfield, and a few others. I would dearly love for him to be interested in H2G2 or Crichton or any of the thousands of books that I love, but he just doesn't want to read those yet.
Ability doesn't even translate into interest!

Hmmm, Boo (5 y.o.)started reading signs, T-Shirts and short Bob-style books around 13 mos. old. She was reading Frog and Toad are Friends and other books by Arnold Lobel by the time she was 18 mos. and it just went from there.

At 16 mos. of age I noticed her adding and subtracting in quantities of up to 10. Now at 5 she's pretty good at math when she wants to be. I call it practical math. For example, when we are at the store and she wants to know if she has enough money to purchase something she can figure out the price, including sales tax, if she has enough money, how much more she will have to save up(or convince her brother to let her borrow) if she is short on cash, or how much she will have left over in her head in about a minute.

I can't tell if her brother, Racer (3 y.o.), is reading yet. He might be as he can tell me about books I have never read to him and I found him enthralled with a joke book the other day. He was muttering one of the punchlines to himself and giggling up a storm. I asked Boo if she had read it to him and she said, "He probably read it himself". He seems to be a strong visual-spatial learner. He can see a puzzle put together once and put it together on his own after that.

Although he generally requires knowing what the end product is supposed to look like first. His sister is quite similar in that regard but he has a knack for mechanical things and building. He always seems to know where something should go for maximum support/benefit/whathave you. His number sense is fairly strong, too.

I couldn't agree with this statement more, Nautigal.

DD (now 4.5) started reading at the age of 2. She never learned phonics ... she just simply taught herself to read. And within a couple of months, she could read almost anything. I'll never forget the look on the pediatric dentist's face when she handed dd (then 3) a sample tube of toothpaste and dd said, "Look, Mom ... this has cavity protection - and fluoride!"

DD uses her reading skills to gain information. But she seldom picks up a book to read herself. She does enjoy being read to at night and she loves listening to chapter books on cd ... she'll retell the story, so I know she appreciates the plot and intricacies of some good fiction. But even though she's a strong reader ... I'm at a loss as to how to get her to love reading.

My daughter was a non-fiction reader until she met Harry Potter. Now, she is ignoring us. She is interested mostly in math and science.

It always cracks me up because her reading scores were always high, but she did not like to read. We read books as a family. She constantly looked up things.

She is so into Harry Potter and the vocabulary and the spells. She was even late into this (due to her sensitivity issues). Most of her friends in elementary school were reading them in third grade and she got hooked in sixth.

Ah! That reminds me of my ds, about 5 at the time, wasn't interested in reading the word 'the' or getting it as a sight word.
He thought it was inconsequential or somesuch!
Finally I just had him hold a piece of paper and a hole punch while I read a favorite story.. He had to punch the paper whenever I read 'the'. He ended up with a very small amount of paper left at the end of this story. He really seemed to get ok with 'the' after that.

DS5 knew sight words at 2, but before his 3rd birthday, he started reading books to us. At first, I thought it was just his memory (we read the same ones over and over again), but when he picked out a book we hadn't read yet and read almost every word, we were shocked. He sounds out words and uses words in the sentence to figure out words he doesn't know.