Like others, my sister (ten years older) taught me to read before I started school, though I don’t remember it. This was in the 50s and there were large flip charts with the Dick and Jane characters saying things like “Look” “See”, etc. I knew what they were and kept shouting them out. The teacher finally said “Does anyone besides Cheffie know the answer?” I read everything I could get my hands on and used my mother’s library card because I was too young to get my own. I could always read faster than anyone else and with high retention, and was usually the best speller in my classes.
While others were being introduced to Fun With Dick and Jane, our 1st grade class got Jack and Janet.
I suspect it was no less inane. I was picking it up okay but i wasn’t enthused. The summer after 1st grade, my Dad began reading me one chapter a night from Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, the old blue and brown cover hand-me-downs that had been printed in the 40s.
Then after the second book was completed he proclaimed that he didn’t have time to keep doing this, but I should try it on my own, see how I do. That lit the fire. I’ve been inhaling the written word ever since.
I was at school in either kindergarten or first grade when I suddenly realized that the letters made words and I could make sense of them (we had the books with Dick, Jane, Sally, Puff, etc.). I was so excited that I actually blurted out “Hey, I can read!”.
I immediately found those books to be boring as heck & started to read anything else I could get my little paws on. As I progressed in school, we got a “reader” with various stories on the first day of each school year. My brother & I would bring them home the first day, read them in their entirety & try to give them back to the teachers the next day because we were done with them.
Living in a small house in Northern Idaho for the summer, and followed along while my mother read from “Bomba The Jungle Boy”. By the time I started kindergarten that fall I was reading it by myself. When they started with the Dick And Jane books, and the other kids were reading out loud one word at a time as if they were just random words on a list, I would read it out loud, with inflection and emotion.
That’s the story I was always told as well. Our next door neighbor was a second grade teacher and gave us some reading textbooks, which I still have. Also my grandmother read to me, and took me to the library a lot. I remember trying to check out the maximum number of Nancy Drew books I could carry.
I don’t remember learning to read. I do remember looking out the window when I was 4 and seeing Mom coming up the walk with a paper bag of groceries in her arms, and sticking out the top was a book for me. 
Mom said that I taught myself to read by pointing out things on the menu at the diner we occasionally went to, but I don’t remember that. We always had books around, so it was natural to fall into reading.
I remember watching my mom read. She preferred books instead of tv.
It made me at age 4 or 5 want to read too. I was in her room, reading my Dr Seuss books before 1st grade. I had a large jigsaw puzzle of the US states. I learned to read and recognize the state names.
I was bored in most of my 1st and 2nd grade classes. My big problem was penmenship. My hand eye coordination was poor and learning cursive script gave me trouble. My handwriting is still poor.
The Hardy Boys were a big help in my reading journey. I wanted to understand the stories and bugged my parents to explain words. I was reading Hardy Boy books by 2nd grade.
I still recommend Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew because the vocabulary is fairly basic and the stories are interesting. A 2nd grader would know most of the words and only needs a little help to read the first book. The other books have a similar vocabulary and the child gains confidence.
I don’t exactly remember when I began to read, and the family joke is that I was born with a book in my hands, but I do remember reading through my first novel. It was a likely simplified translation of Gulliver’s travels in Spanish that we were reading in school and I was not satisfied with reading only the first chapter as assigned so went on to read the whole book.
I also remember teaching myself to read in English. We spoke English at home, but at the time I went to a local school so I did not learn the English language in a formal way. I picked up a book at home that was in English and started reading it. Since English is not phonetic I got some of the words wrong in my head, but I did grasp enough of the meaning to make it through.
At least that is how I remember it, my family may have some other version.
//i\\
I’m not sure when I learned, but it was probably before I started school. Kindergarten wasn’t mandatory, so I’m talking 1st grade. I know that it wasn’t long until I was reading fluently. In second grade I was allowed to check out any book I wanted from the school Library (I’m not sure if the fact that my Grandma was in charge of the systems libraries had anything to do with that). The teacher also let me help her select books for the rest of the class. No wonder I ended up being a librarian.
This is me. I can’t remember ever not being able to read. I had an older sister so maybe she’d passed the mysteries on to me before I remembered it?
Luckily, my November bday got me in the year I should have been in, but I was always the youngest in my group.
I do remember being told I was too young at age 10 to read The Complete Sherlock Holmes that I wanted to check out of the library. When I complained to my dad, he got his old copy off the shelf in his bedroom and gave it to me. I loved it!
I later started working at that library branch (and worked there my last two years in high school and throughout my college years), and that library aid (not a librarian) was rather a dimbulb. Maybe she couldn’t read it.
It must have started in kindergarten because I could read in the 1st grade. That was 1964. They ran out of rooms at the school so they bought or rented 2 houses that were divided in 2 to make 4 classrooms. I distinctly remember reading in a circle of students and wondering why some of the other kids were struggling. The reading room was “sunk in” because it was the garage. I also remember taking a test of printing words and we weren’t allowed to use an eraser. Not sure why. The field behind the houses backed up to the elementary school we were associated with and we played Red Rover and either Kickball or Dodgeball…
I can find no pictures of the school houses and the school associated with it has been torn down and rebuilt. The school houses were converted back to houses.
I don’t remember clearly but I remember my parents reading to me from a very early age, and I could certainly read by the time I started school. My mum used to take me with her to the local library long before I was old enough to join (I think you had to be at least 7yrs old for the junior library), she used to sit me in a corner with a book from the children’s library and leave me there while she picked her own books up.
The librarian (who had a reputation as a proper dragon) knew my mum, and knew I would sit quietly with that book until mum came back for me. Mum was extremely proud when the librarian gave me my very own library ticket so I could take out one book every time we visited. It was such a treat to have a book that I was allowed to take home!
Not really specifics about the mechanics of learning to read, just that reading, books, and libraries were always a big part of our childhood. My dad worked for. Rand McNally, and we had 100s of kids’ books, multiple sets of encyclopedias… Mom did the Great Books series at least twice… I cannot remember a time that I did not have a library card.
As I recall it, my mom would read me a book, then have me read one to her. I’m told I was reading (not clear how well) at 4.
I came home in tears from day 1 of primary school, aged 5, because I “didn’t learn to read”.
I was vastly jealous of my 2 yr older brother, who could read at that point.
My parents, both teachers, albeit high school teachers, then started teaching me to read. It gave me something of an advantage at school, but (now I am a parent myself) I realise that my newborn love of reading freed my parents from that.
However… I did cheat. There was a school library, so I could easily get more advanced books.
I read voraciously, so my “reading age” was well above my actual age. And got to the point where library books were way more interesting than the set books, so much so that I basically skimmed “Janet and John” so that I could bullshit my teacher that I had actually read my homework.
These days, sadly, I hardly ever read. When I do, it is usually long form journalism on the web.
I remember realizing that the K on the Kenmore dishwasher was the same K that began my name. I was three. I was reading at maybe a third grade level in kindergarten. Beginning a long career of deep painful boredom in school.
For all I know I was born literate. I have no memory of learning to read.
I guess the K in Kulfreida is not only silent but invisible! 
Another one here who has no recollection at all of learning to read. One thing I do remember was lobbying my mother to be skipped to second grade because I liked the teacher there better. 
She indulged me and took the request to the principal’s office, and I remember being asked to read to the principal as one of the tests I had to pass. Apparently I passed because I was indeed transferred to the second grade. This was a mixed blessing because from that point on I was usually the youngest kid in every class, and then got thrown into a big university at a very tender age indeed.
The other thing I remember is that learning to read for the first time was accomplished entirely at home, with my parents’ encouragement and help from my older brother. I still have a vivid memory of a book called “It Happened One Day”. The green cover with an illustration of a yellow lion is so deeply associated with my early childhood that I actually bought a used copy a few years ago and it’s sitting on my coffee table right now. If it wasn’t the first book I ever read, it was certainly one of the first.
I’m seeing a distinct pattern here – parents who read, and read to and with their children. I can’t remember if my parents read to or with me, and we didn’t have a lot of books around the house when I was a kid, but my parents did read the newspaper, some magazines like Life, and Reader’s Digest.
I didn’t learn to read until I started 1st grade. I was the oldest and for some reason I was not sent to kindergarten; I think it was because at that time - mid 50s - my parents didn’t think it was more than glorified day care. However, I seem to remember that some of my classmates already knew how to read, and I was miffed that they could do something I couldn’t. So I applied myself to Dick and Jane until I mastered it. And after that I read everything I could.
I remember that one of my classrooms had a small bookcase in the back, and every chance I got I would pick something to read. The teacher had a “story time” where she would read one of the books to the class. Then one time she chose a book I had already read and I was incredibly bored while she was reading it.