I learned to read and write by myself at the age of 3, although my first writing was not by hand, but using my father’s typewriter.
My learning to read came about through my mother reading comics to me (“Mortadelo” and “Sacarino”). I found them hysterically funny and had her read them to me again and again and again – I ended up associating the words she read with the signs on the paper, and from then on I took off.
I began writing shortly afterwards – I checked my father’s typewriter and saw that the keys had the same individual symbols that were printed on the comics I loved. I knew how to put paper in the machine from watching my father type, so everything followed “automatically”.
I only learned to write by hand when I began attending school at the age of 6
Jeezuz, this is a sucky memory for me. I learned to read from being read to by my mom, for hours, or I threw a tantrum. I learned to print by copying what I was looking at in books.
By the time I started school, I had already read almost all of the Hardy Boys series and was writing my own letters to Santa. School Officials decided that because I was moon-calfing instead of keeping place with the rest of the class while reading “See Dick. See Dick run…” I needed tutoring, for three damn years! And forcing me to learn cursive…well that bitch got fired after refusing to take me on a field trip my mom specifically wanted me to go on to the planetarium, because I hated cursive for being useless and wasteful and refusing to learn or use it. I can’t say that that one instance is what got her fired, I do know that’s what my Mom told me after the teacher went away shortly before spring break.
I don’t specifically remember, but it must have been my mother (perhaps with some help from my older sister). Certainly, by the time I was in first grade, I was annoying my mother by taking books she had intended to read for herself.
Writing, I think I mostly picked up myself as part of the same process as learning to read. It wasn’t until about third grade, though, that I learned to write semi-legibly: My cursive was neater than my print letters (which is damning with faint praise), and the habits of cursive eventually bled through into printing, too.
My dad taught me to read just after my 4th birthday, and he and mom worked jointly on teaching me to write before I started kindergarten. My brother then confounded them both by having no interest in hearing stories and refusing to be taught to read until he was 6.
Unlike CT_Damsel, I actually did get in trouble in first grade for getting tired of hearing kids painfully sound out words and telling them what it said.
And also for refusing to sound out words I already knew. Conversations with my teacher would go like this:
The word provided is CAT
Teacher, pointing at the word: sound it out.
me: cat
Teacher: no, sound it out.
Me, getting frustrated: it says cat.
Teacher, also frustrated: sound. it. out.
Me: caaaaaaaaaaaattt
She probably should have identified strongly with the teacher in To Kill a Mockingbird.
It blows my mind reading all these detailed descriptions of events from such a young age. I barely remember high school, much less who taught me to read. I’m going to assume it was a group effort. I don’t know when I started reading, I just remember I was always so happy to read in the quiet. I hated reading aloud.
I remember my third grade teacher telling my mom I had beautiful handwriting. I have no idea if she was exaggerating though. I just remember feeling proud of myself.
My mother, when I was five. She was an avid reader, and wanted to get me hooked so I would leave her alone to her own books. She did the same with my two siblings. Sure made first and second grade a breeze.
My father (an engineer) drilled me and my siblings in math at the dinner table our entire pre-adult lives. I never learned anything in a math class that I didn’t already know until I was a sophomore in college.
In possibly related news, both of my siblings home-schooled all of their kids through high school. Not having any offspring myself, I don’t know what I would have done with them.
When I started school, I only had my first teacher for a couple of months before she moved away, and a new teacher arrived in the new year. She was assessing all the kids’ abilities, and I remember so clearly her starting with the earliest young reader books, then after I read it perfectly skipping a level up, then again, finally getting to the highest level book she had on her shelf, and I read that perfectly. She seemed flummoxed. I ended up reading the books intended for 10 year olds, even though I was just 5. I did need some help with silent letters and quirky things like ‘-ough’ but I was basically left to my own devices as far as reading.
I was also subsequently good at spelling, but my writing (printing) was atrocious and, though it got better, it’s now horrendous again.
(I was also good at maths, but that’s about as far as it went - I was quite bad at everything else)
My first teacher a lovely lady called Miss Perrow. I have always had a problem with spelling and grammar and I have to thank a senior school teacher for teaching me how to understand the meaning of what I was reading. Another encourager was a moderator on another site I apologised for my spelling only to be told off and reminded of the importance of having my say.
According to my mother, Daddy taught me. Mostly for selfish reasons - he just wanted me to hush and let him unwind with a book after work. I don’t remember not knowing how to read. My only evidence is my autograph written in my baby book - dated by my mother, when I was about 2 years and 7 months. And I do have a recollection around age 3, of my grandfather asking me to spell the name of a nearby town. I spelled it wrong the first time, and Grandpa reminded me that a short “e” in the first syllable implied a double consonant. So, Metter, not Meter. I think he was proving to his brother that no, really, his granddaughter was a genius!
Although my father read to me a fair amount, I was not interested enough to watch the words go by. I learned to read and write in first and second grades (there was no reading in kindergarten in those days). I was seven one day and suddenly discovered that comics were much more fun if I read the words. I was quite startled to discover that and I still remember the feeling. There was no Sesame Street (no TV in fact) when I started school in 1942 and things were much more relaxed. I don’t think it slowed me down at all. By fifth grade I was supposedly reading at tenth grade level.
My kids all went to French immersion school and we were advised not to teach them to read in English because it would interfere with their learning to read French (a crock of BS, IMHO) so my daughter the older one didn’t read English or at least thought she didn’t. But her brother, 17 months younger, taught himself to read at age 4, just by paying attention to what we were reading him. So one day, when he was five and she had just passed seven, he was reading to her and then we observed her correcting him. So my wife asked her to read. She said, “Oh, I can’t read English.” My wife asked her to try and she was able to read easily. Who taught her?
My mom, with help from Sesame Street. She said it didn’t take much to get me reading. I really liked books, and just took to reading easily.
I was reading crazy young, like age 2 or 3. I read Little Women in 3rd grade. I got in trouble in 4th grade for reading one of my mom’s college textbooks; I was bored because I’d finished our assigned books a month into school. (And that’s how I got into the gifted program).
I don’t remember who taught me to write, but I know I was writing the alphabet and numbers before Kindergarten. (Pre-K wasn’t a thing then, except for Head Start.) I started Kindergarten when I was 4.
I love reading to this day. Got my undergrad degree in English (British Literature concentration).
I remember the day well. My mother was ironing and my brother was delivering the clothes to their proper rooms on his “horsie.” (the vacuum cleaner). I picked up a book called Mac and Jeff and read it by myself for the first time. I taught myself to read at age four.
However, I resisted all attempts to learn how to write until I found out what a diary was. Right before my eighth birthday, I picked up a book of my brother’s on how to write cursive, and taught myself. I’ve kept a daily journal since the day I turned eight.
My sister taught me at age 3 using Archie comics. I was reading at about a grade 6 level by the time I was in kindergarten. Comics really helped in terms of vocabulary.
My mother. I could read in kindergarten, then the nuns started repeating the process.
The issue became what to read. When I discovered science fiction in 4th grade my mother called it “Something Crazy!”.
We should have some national recommended reading lists. It seems culture is indoctrinating kids with the official junk, so we just have lots of confusion.
My older sister was in first grade, and I was four and a half. She was learning to read, and would put her finger under every word as she read it to my parents. I watched from over her shoulder, and just kind of inhaled it without trying, and next thing any of us knew, I was reading on my own.
If a particular word flummoxed me, I’d ask my mother. But that didn’t happen very often, because from the get-go, I was pretty good at picking up word meanings from context.
When I started kindergarten the next fall, they had phonics cards and posters on the wall with the sounds that went with some of the more tricky combinations, and from those, I almost immediately filled in most of my remaining holes in terms of sounding out words. (Up to that point, there were words where I’d picked up their meaning, but would have gotten the pronunciation wrong. But it hadn’t been that important, because I was mostly just reading to myself.)
Cut her some slack; she might have wanted to verify that you didn’t just memorize words. After I was caught reading ahead in first grade a couple of time, I was never ask to read out of turn - the teacher made sure I could read, and then didn’t make an issue out of it.
I wonder if that’s true for most of us, the famous love of reading instilled in child by reading parents was really just a way to get us to leave them alone for a bit.
My oldest brother (ten years older) read to me constantly. I’d sit on his lap and he’d read at the table with his finger under the words for me. Both of my parents did as well, but I mostly remember my brother doing it.
My best friend at the time, who was a year ahead of me in school, taught me to read when he was in 1st grade and I was in kindergarten. Evidently teaching was a good fit for him as he eventually became a teacher and is now a high school principal.
I never formally learned cursive. I was skipped from kindergarten to 3rd grade and cursive writing was taught in 2nd grade at the time. Since my elementary school teachers knew my situation, I was allowed to print, rather than write. I can write in cursive as an adult, but it is a slow, laborius and largely illegibile process.
