I ask because I don’t really remember. Maybe it’s because I smoked all that pot in the 70s. Anyway, I know I was reading simple books in kindergarten. I didn’t go to preschool but I remember my mom spent a lot of time showing me books and stuff, so I think I may have been reading earlier, but then again I might just be imagining that.
I hope I posted this in the right forum. It’s been about six thousand years since I’ve posted a topic.
At four years old, I could look up at a gas station sign and say:
“ARCO.”
One clear memory I have is that I used to buy and read the Beezer (a British comic book) when it cost 2d - which is pre-decimalisation. Decimalisation took place in 1971, when I was three.
Thinking on it, I can’t really remember a time when I couldn’t read. That’s gotta be my brain getting all mixed up though, because my mother wasn’t the kind that would sit and read to me and my father was illiterate.
I didn’t learn to write until I was 10, mind.
My mother tells me that I was reading - as opposed to just memorizing and reciting back favorite books - at age 3.
I personally don’t remember ever not being able to read.
Five. I learned in kindergarten, which is everyone at my school learned.
I believe I was 3 years old.
My mom says I taught myself to read using those books on tape where you follow along “and when the chime rings, turn the page.”
Also age 3, can’t remember when I couldn’t read, etc. I was always getting dragged out in front of company to read the newspaper and such.
An early 3. I read the newspaper to my grandparents.
Somewhere around three or four–I don’t remember.
I do remember looking out the living-room window, watching the big kids going off to kindergarten, and wondering what it would be like… and then seing my mom coming up the sidewalk with the groceries in her arms, and a book for me sticking out the top. It was a science book, so I was already reading those at age 4.
I also learned to read in kindergarten, which was perfectly normal at the time. Until that point, I had memorized what so many words looked like that I think most people thought I could read. Since I thought that the secret to reading was just memorizing what every single word in the dictionary looked like, I thought I was reading, too.
And then in about the second week of kindergarten, my teacher started us on the Millie and the cowboy story as a way of teaching us the sounds of the alphabet. And I thought, “Oh my god! How come no one ever told me that the letters make sounds?” I felt like such an idiot, but was reading for real in about a week. And I was pretty pissed at my parents, quite frankly, for not telling me this little tidbit of information. Can you believe–they were TEACHERS!!
I don’t remember the age, but I know it was a year younger than anybody expected.
I have a brother who’s a year older; my parents bought the Dr. Seuss set to read to him and teach him how to read, and they dragged me along with him, so I picked it up at about the same time he did, just a year younger.
I remember my Mom sitting us down with one of the books to read and I saw the logo on the cover with the Cat in the Hat surrounded by the words, “I can read it all by myself”. I pointed at the logo and read it aloud, and my mom made me read the whole damn book out loud.
How I learned to read?
By having older siblings who forbad me to read their books. Thus in third grade I was reading books like Homer Price and A Christmas Carol. I also began to read the books my mother read - especially when I found out there were movies based on them. I must have read every book by such mystery writers as Rex Stoutr and Agatha Christie. I was also forbidden to read my brothers comix including all the reprints of tale of the crypt. I book all kinds of books about ESP and Alien Abduction. But I did not read the newspaper.
Go figure!
I taught myself to read before kindergarten, to the point that by the time my parents realized I could read, I was doing so fluently. I was reading on 6th grade level by 1st grade. I had thought this was fairly unusual, but is seems a lot of Dopers are self-taught as well. Is it not as unusual as I thought, or does the SDMB attract a higher proportion of self-taught readers than average?
I was 3 as well. Mom was reading me “The House that Jack Built,” and I started reading it for myself. She thought I had it memorized, but when she skipped around on the pages, I kept reading.
It would have been earlier, but that big bully Kerchak kept bugging me about it. But after I killed him I had a lot more time. Stupid ape! Kreegah!
More seriously, I was reading fluently by the time I was three or four. I seem to recall finishing the first reader we got in scholl on the first or second day.
I was 3 or 4. I remember my mom teaching me then, she had some sort of workbook and we’d do it when my younger siblings were sleeping. When I started kindergarden at age 5 it was a big deal because I was the only child in my class who could read. When I started elementary school at age 6 is was really weird - they taught kids to read in that grade and they did it differently, phonics or something. All I really remember is that they didn’t know what to do with me because I could already read the normal way. My elementary school was a different type of school - instead of classrooms and separate 1st-6th grades there were 4 colonies and it was open (no classrooms), kids advanced to the next colony when they had the ability to do the higher level work. So there I was, 6 years old, and had to go on to the higher level with the older kids while all my friends stayed and played in Colony 1. At the time, it seemed to me Colony 2 was all about work, Colony 1 kids got to play games all day. It sucked.
I’m told I was 2 when I started. I can’t really remember much of it, but the story I’ve been told is that I was reading things like cereal boxes at breakfast, road signs, things like that, but I was a bit sketchy on individual letters.
I spent most of my childhood with my nose in a book.
I was about 4. Since I had memorized my favorite Dr. Seuss books it’s hard to say exactly when I began reading them myself, but one afternoon I climbed into my mother’s lap and started reading out of the new issue of Time.
When I got to kindergarten, the teacher reprimanded my mother for having taught me to read: “He’s not supposed to learn that until first grade!” This was in 1972. I hope the pedagogy in suburban public schools has improved since then.
I was four. I was taught by my father’s 16-year-old cousin who was staying with us for the summer. I don’t remember this, but this was the story my parents (and the cousin) told me and I’m stickin’ to it. From age 8 until very recently, I spent about 2 hours a day reading, even if it was comic strip books (mostly Pogo, Doonesbury, B.C. and Peanuts compilations) or Ripley’s Believe it or Not! compilations.
I am not sure how old I was but when I was in kindergarten, I was taking the Little House books out of the school library. The librarian didn’t believe I could actually read them - they were in short supply so they didn’t want kids who wouldn’t actually be able to use them to take them out - so I had to take a “reading test” to prove I could read. The librarian picked out a passage and had me read it out loud, which I did quite easily (I was reading my older brother’s school texts already too). She thought I was playing some kind of trick and had memorized it somehow and brought in another teacher to test me. By the end of the demonstration, I had four or five teachers and the principal all standing around me, picking out various books from which they asked me to read aloud. There was much hootin’ and hollerin’ going on.
However, I didn’t really learn how to do long division correctly until the 8th grade.