I guess I was reading what you would normally read to a child that age. Little Golden Books, Fairy Tales, Clifford the Big Red Dog, that sort of stuff and progressing from there.
I read the Star Wars novel right after seeing the movie when I was 8, kicking off my love of science fiction forevermore (aahhh a geek even back then :rolleyes: ).
I assume 3 or 4. I often read to my kindergarten class. This boy named Jason would harass me about not reading loud enough. :rolleyes:
Well, I was definitely reading the Science Made Simple book when I was four and a half, the book whose illustration style was perfectly parodied by Science Made Stupid. I remember looking out the front window and seeing Mom coming up the sidewalk with a bag of groceries in her arms, and the book sticking out the top.
We also had a series of red-covered story anthologies that had stories of all kinds, and one of the books was science fiction. I was reading that around the age of five. When I was in kindergarten or grade one I would hide in the library and read small science books.
I learned to read at 3 and a half, because my Mom read “Black Beauty” to us kids, a chapter a night, and, being the impatient lil shit I still am, wanted to figger out the rest of the story muy pronto. Deciphered them odd words then, and then went to a Carden school, which emphasised early reading.
I don’t know if it was such a good thing then; I was younger than most kids in my grade through school, shy, and would hide out in books, with some detriment in social skills. On the other end, looking back, I sucked up knowledge through books well, which served to get through the desolate straights of my High School years, in an average school.
I suppose the main thing is that I still read volumes, with joy. I know most of the folks here do, too, but I see many people in daily life who just don’t read at all. I can’t imagine that.
I don’t read. I think it’s boring. I used to read all the time, but then I got sick of it and started noticing bad writing everywhere and after finishing a book I started thinking “Well, I’m glad that’s over with” instead of “Wow, what a great book.” So I stopped reading novels. I still read nonfiction books and newspapers. I guess that makes me a boring old fart at the tender age of 17. Sigh.
I can’t remember not being able to read, but I do know that it was before kindergarten. I would wait for the paper to arrive so I could read the comic strip Dondi.
Does anyone remember that strip?
I first remember reading a book around when I was…5, I think. I might have been reading the onscreen text on Sesame Street for awhile before, though.
Come to think of it, I remember being confused watching Disney’s Peter and the Wolf awhile before that, because one character spelled out “W…O…L…F. Wolf!” while writing it in the snow…in Cyrilic. I suppose if I couldn’t read at all then, I wouldn’t have noticed the odd alphabet.
And I read The Hunt for Red October when I was 7 or 8, I think.
I clearly remember reading the menu to my family at a restaurant when I was 4. I must’ve been able to read before that point in time.
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know the alphabet, thanks to Sesame Street.
I can’t remember exactly when I started reading… but I know that well before I started kindergarten, I had run the entire gamut of Dr. Seuss books. I’m sure there’s still a library of the damn things in my parents’ basement somewhere. For my first couple years of school, I was eating up a Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew book every day or two, and my dad had me working through The Hobbit by the early part of third grade or so (and I was relatively young for my grade 'cause of when my birthday was - I was 4 for the first few months of kindergarten, etc etc). I was (and still am) kind of a psycho-reader, though - the only thing better than a good party on a Friday night is a good book 
The cereal box (front & back)
The Readers Digests in the bathroom, but only the funny parts, and only the short ones of those.
The moralistic Christian books that apparently were supposed to teach me values (I remember one about a bad little colt who disobeyed his mom. Bleh.)
Bambi’s Children
Street signs
But about comprehension, who knows? Because at some point before I started school I started a story–I mean writing one–and when I read it to my mother she started laughing because I said, “Owntz upon a time…” Sure, I spelled it right, but pronounced it way wrong, and I’d only heard it in about a hundred other stories at that point. I had no idea what it meant. It was how you started a story.
I must have been about 2-3. My aunts (mum’s sisters), took it on themselves to make sure I could read before I went to nursery school (kindergarten). The teachers at nursery school decided that they couldn’t justify keeping me in nursery until I had actually turned 5 (which is the official ‘proper’ school starting age), and I ended up transferring to the infant school at about 4.5, thus ensuring that combined with my birthdate, I’d always be one of the very youngest in my year. Not that that’s ever actually hampered me.
As a kid (and even now), I was a voracious reader, and couldn’t wait till I was old enough to take six books oout of the library at a time, meaning I’d only have to go to the library once a week to get a new supply of books, and not twice a week!
Wow, thanks for all your answers. Didn’t think there’d be such a big response.
Yeah, I’m sure my friend’s girl is just fine. I’ll tell him a bunch of people he’s never met told him not to worry! (He’s not very internetty.)
Sounds like a lot of you caused your teachers a lot of trouble by being so clever!
This thread reminds me of parents who claim 4 yr olds need lists of spelling words or parents who claim that their child is a genius yet they are consistently unable to find their own shoes.
JEEEEEEEEZ! You could read at 3 (the teacher in me has many questions!) but how the fuck do you think that is normal? AVERAGE children learn to read at 5-6.
Super-Dooper-Clever “type” children seem to be using this thread to flaunt. Flaunting is something Super-Dooper-Clever “type” children SHOULD have learnt about at 5/6. Flaunting is something that guilty feeling mums do. You read at 2? You were in early childcare and mum happened to read the book that was read to you everyday this week? (Dr Seuss…what a bloke!)
. Do you REMEMBER reading or were you told you were read to?
If I take the word of every 2 and 3 yr old reader in this thread, that you were readers, then it is still not unreasonable to believe that YOU are the freaks and a 5 year old learning to read is completely normal!
I don’t have memories of not being able to read, but neither do I remember when I first began to. The consensus in my family is that I learned somewhere around four or five.
As one of those 3 year old readers, I fully accept that yes, I am a freak (story of my life). And as for your question, I can distinctly remember reading and not being read to – both at home and whilst at nursery school.
The OP asked at what age people on the SDMB learnt to read, the OP however, did not add “freaks need not respond”.
Kindly point out where any of this was said. :rolleyes:
The OP asked “When did you learn to read?” So we told her. You want us to add a few years to make you happy, what?
I knew how to read before kindergarten, which would have made me 4 1/2 or perhaps just turned 5. Yes, I was a freak, and I was even aware of it at the time - the school arranged for me to attend reading classes with a group of first graders while my classmates worked on their alphabet. Mom says I learned partly from being read to (she and Dad were both in the habit of following along with their fingers so we could see what they were reading), partly from educational television, and partly because, being the youngest in a family of readers, I didn’t want to be left out of everything.
The two little flodnaks both learned close to their fifth birthdays, though by different means. Both attended a Montessori preschool at the time, and in Montessori the kids are taught letter sounds (not names) first, then they learn to “write” using movable wooden or plastic letters, then to write for real with a pencil, and reading is supposed to spring naturally from writing. One of the boys learned that way, textbook Montessori style. The other cracked the code before he was actually done with the letter sounds bit, and blew off any sort of writing for the next six months.
I was capable of reading back to you just about anything you showed me, but as to what I actually read for myself…Hop on Pop, Go Dog Go, The Cat in the Hat, Berenstain Bears, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish…just plain old stuff that appeals to toddlers.
I don’t remember not reading. Reading goes back farther than my memories of childhood. My mom’s story is that we were driving to my grandparents house a bit before my third birthday, and I read a McDonald’s sign we passed. My mom thought it was pretty neat that I could recognize the logo, but then I read the name of a car dealership as well. When we got to my grandparents house she gave me a newspaper article and tape recorded me reading it.
Yes, I was aware that other kids didn’t learn to read quite that early. I remember being mystified in kindergarten during a zoo trip when a kid standing directly in front of a sign that said “do not feed the monkeys” asked the teacher if we could feed the monkeys. When my mother dropped me off for the first day of first grade, she told my teacher I could read already, and the teacher nodded politely, thinking she meant I had some simple word recognition down. When she saw that I was actually able to read, I couldn’t understand her surprise, since my mom had told her. The teacher dragged me around to read to every teacher in the school, and it was kind of nice; I was aware I could do a neat trick most kids my age couldn’t do yet.
But a neat trick is all it was, really. Teaching yourself to read early is not that amazing or unusual. Lots of kids do it. Harper Lee did, and wrote the character Scout as an early reader whose teachers were mad at her father for “teaching her to read before she was supposed to.” An early reader may be a bright kid, but when you get down to it, all kids have some amazing capacity for language. Little kids in bilingual homes teach themselves two languages simultaneously all the time, a feat most adults couldn’t pull off. Kids are sponges.
I don’t bring it up very often because people will just roll their eyes at you for being such a “jeenyous,” and if you work it into the conversation you just come off like a asshole. But I don’t shy away from it if it comes up, either, because it’s not that big a deal. There are lots of people much, much smarter than me that learned to read at 6 or 7. I can safely say I’m a fairly smart guy, just like I’m a fairly tall guy. But I’m not the smartest or tallest you’ll ever meet.
My mother claims my baby sisters and I were two. I couldn’t verify that my ownself–but I have no memory of NOT being able to read.
Like some others of us, I don’t remember not being able to read. Mother says I was two, nearly three. She used flashcards and put me in Montessori school, which probably accounts for some of it.
My very favorite book was her paperback copy of “The Happy Prince and Other Tales”, a compilation of Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories. I remember just what it looked like, and I remember several of the stories very clearly. I read that book until it fell apart, then I taped it up and kept reading. 
When I started kindergarten, my mother tried to convince the school that I didn’t need to be there, I needed to be in first grade. I’d already learned everything kindergarten had to teach me. They weren’t convinced. Finally, Mom stomped in with me and a newspaper. The school, you see, hadn’t even bothered to test me – she’s six, she goes to kindergarten, end of story. She sat me down in front of the principal and pointed to a news article and said “Read.” I read. She offered the paper to the principal for him to choose an article. I read that one too – what was the big deal? The newspaper was boring, bring on the picture books.
They were fairly surprised, no doubt about it. When they did test me, they discovered that I was reading on a 10th-grade level to a college level, depending on what they gave me.
All this really means, though, is that I’m good with languages. I always have been. I’m fairly smart, too, but intelligence is a handicap to a high school student – when you get to college you suddenly learn that you actually have to work for your grades now, taking notes and studying and everything.
And just like everyone else says, just because you learn to read later than some doesn’t mean you’re any less bright. Am I forever stupid because I’ve never gained fluency in Arabic? Am I crippled because it took me ages to learn to do long division properly?