I was three. My mother worked long hours, came home tired, and then had to deal with me. I usually wanteed to be read to, so one night she finally stacked some easy books on the kitchen table, sat down with me, and taught me to read. I still maintain she did it as much for herself as for me; I had a penetrating voice as a child.
I can’t remember not being able to read, either - I guess I was about 2 when I started. My mother wanted me to be able to read and write before I started school because I’m a leftie, and in the 50s schools still tried to force kids to write with their right hand.
It worked too - I went straight into P2 and, apart from a few comments, I had no problems about writing with the ‘wrong’ hand.
My grandparents taught me to read and I started to get really good at in around age 3.
When I went to school I was in the highest reading groups but I had a lot of trouble writing. I wrote my letters backwards.
We didn’t have a gifted program and I was already a year younger than my classmates so skipping a grade wasn’t something they wanted to do with me - especially with my “learning disability.” :rolleyes: So I did a lot of independant study type stuff. I had some great teachers who would bring me books from home as I had exhausted the small school library by fourth grade. They also looked the other way when I hid under the desks to read through recess.
I can remember putting together the letters of my first new word, not in a book… “Cafeteria.” I was a toddler… I have no idea how old I was.
I know for certain I was reading the encyclopedia by age 3. The encyclopedia was the 1968 edition, and it was purchased new.
My favorite volume was ‘S’ because of the entry under Space. But I was terrified of the color plates under ‘Snake.’ I wouldn’t even touch those pages.
Started to learn about 3. The good nuns at the parochial school made sure we could read by the end of 1st grade. I find it troubling that kids today can’t read (or don’t have to learn) until 3rd grade. What’s up with that?
No one knows. Similar to MinnePurl mom realized one day that I was actually reading books and not reciting them from memory. I was 4 at the time, but no one knows when I started reading. I didn’t learn to write till I was in school.
I was about 4. Definitely before kindergarten, I knew how to read when I started, and I never went to pre-school, either.
I remember learning to spell, I guess I was around 3. My parents used to spell out words when they didn’t want me to know what they were talking about.
I kept it a secret since I liked being “in” on theirs, until pride got the better of me and I let the cat out of the bag.
My mother was intrigued and began reading with me, as did one of my cousins, and by the time I was 4 I was obsessed with Dick and Jane and Dr. Seuss.
Well, according to my mom, I started reading at 6 months. Just easy stuff, like “Pat the Bunny” and Stephen King, but by age two I had finished “Ulysses”; by four, the complete works of Wittgenstein; and by six, I had translated them both into Chinese and Basque. At age 10 I built a workable airplane from toothpaste tubes (used, naturellement) and anti-fungal ointment; at 12 I developed the first comprehensive model of consciousness; at 14 I proved Fermat’s Last Theorem; and now - well, now I work in retail and try to boost my self-esteem by telling strangers what a precocious child I was on internet message boards.
Mom told me that I started reading at age three. She said that she thinks it is because she had my little brother and then my sister was born just a bit over a year later, so I had to find some way to amuse myself.
I also got paraded out in front of the family to “prove” that I could read, and I hated it. I remember sitting at the breakfast bar at my breat aunt’s house, reading my little magazine, and having someone say “She isn’t really reading!” I was/am very shy, so having to read out loud in front of everyone sucked.
I also went through my books very quickly, and took to reading my mom’s magazines. Ladies Home Journal, Working Mother and Redbook are so interesting to kids… I remember reading an issue that had the article about how to tell your kids about sex. Man oh man. :eek:
In kindergarten, I read two books and when the teacher told my mom about it, she said she had no idea that I could read. They must not have taught it in preschool, or she would have known.
I learned how to read in the womb.
Sometime between three and four, I suppose. I remember my Dad showing off my skills by having me write large words for the relatives. Constantinople was one of them.
I learned to read in 1969 when I was in the first grade. I quickly found out that reading was knowledge and knowledge was power. I discovered that reading was vey entertaining, too. My parents were both avid readers and that helped. Then in 1995, I was brain damaged in an automobile accident. When I came out of the coma/delusional state after a month, I found that I could not read. I did not have the memory capacity to put letter together into words and associate these words to things and I could not put words together to complete thoughts. I would forget the subject before i could get to the verb.
My wife was patient, she taugfht me how to read again. Dr.Suess was the best. I think that there is a link between iambic pentameter and memory development. The TV Guide was also helpful for some reason (short bits?). I’m much better now, I read for fun again and I am going to school to start over. Life is good.
How terrible, hlanelee. Glad to hear you’re on your way back and have such an upbeat attitude about it.
Me? The legend goes I could read by 18 months, although there is evidence that it was simple memorization at that point. (One clue was that I had the book upside down.) Nevertheless, I annoyed my nursery school teacher by insisting on reading all the signs during a field trip; didn’t need to use a ruler to stay on the right line of text in group reading in first grade, and blew the test curve in fifth grade by reading at a high-school sophomore level.
At that point, I remember the intense agony of seeing my hard work on a translation of Wittgenstein into Basque appear under someone else’s name and vowed never to be so precocious again.
According to my father, I learned when I was five. I vaguely remember my sister saying something like “My brother was a late reader in our family; he learned when he was five. He has made up for this by never stopping.”
I also stopped visiting the children/‘young adults’'s section in bookstores and libraries around fourth grade. As someone else mentioned, I was reading on a high-school sophomore when I was maybe eight or nine; quite a while ago, at least. I think I read Hamlet when I was eightish.
Oh, you want to know why I don’t know when I could read? Well, I have several assorted memories of my life before and during sixth grade, and the total length of those memories is maybe five minutes. Ipso facto…
I learned around 18 months. My brother is four years older, so he was constantly working on reading when I was a baby.
My earliest memory is me at age 2, sitting at the kitchen table reading The First of Octember by Dr. Seuss. I guess I must have learned some time before that. My mother was very big on teaching my siblings and me to read early. She made flashcards and little practice books. It was very cool. So all of us ended up skipping kindergarten and going straight into first grade when we were five, I’m sure the fact that we could read way ahead of our age level had something to do with that. 
I was three. Started reading aloud one day and shocked the family: driving down A1A in Daytona Beach I started saying “H-O-T-E-L, what do dat spell?” “H-O-L-I-D-A-Y, what do dat spell?”
I read my first “adult” book when I was six: Lords’ A Night to Remember, my first novel when I was seven: Wells’ War of the Worlds.
My two year old knows some of her letters, can recognize some words, and can count to ten. (She also knows her colors and left/right).
Crap. No, that was FIRST GRADE, not kindergarten. So–Fall of 1978; I was nearing 7. But really, it was totally normal to learn to read at that age then.
I was struggling to read by 7, but was in the top 3% (in my age group) of the country by 10! Mostly, because I realised if I didn’t know what a word meant, a good guess was probably correct. It had never occured to be before. Probably because when you learn to read, you always read teh words one by one and are never told to think about context!