I certainly haven't figured out how kids learn to read and I find it quite baffling . My kids never sat in my lap and read along with me, although I did read to them until 2 or 3 with them wandering around and maybe listening or maybe not. By about 3, two of them wouldn't listen and were reading their own stuff instead while I attempted to read to them, so I gave it up!

My theory on my earliest reader? We went on vacation and to amuse the 2yo, we had a Blues Clues video that had words labeled to the cartoon pictures. On the way home from vacation, he was reading signs and within another week or two, he was reading books. I was in denial and blew it off until it became impossible to do so a few weeks later. Another kid read before 3 and I have no idea how it happened, but have a memory of him reading Dr. Seuss fluently to a sibling and I remember thinking, "Oh, DS can read now too!" DD was read to more often, demanded more reading, was more likely to sit in my lap while I read, and even begged for instruction at 4 or so, but still really learned to read in K. She does a more phonics type approach and the others seemed to just figure it out like a code in one big gulp.

My mother-in-law once told me she never believed kids could read early until she saw my kids. I feel the same disbelief at times -- I keep wondering if I was doing teaching I really didn't realize I was doing. But I swear, aside from some Sesame Street and a Blues Clues video, there wasn't any instruction at all and reading simply appeared. Like Cathy, it would *never* have occurred to me to teach it at that age!

DS7 was fascinated with letters very early. Before he was a year old, he was aware of letters and starting to learn them, mostly through his obsessive focus on letter and number puzzles that my dad made for him. Around that same age (12 mos. or a bit more), he would see exit signs (everywhere, of course!) and point at them while shouting "E!" in an excited voice. I remember that it always sounded like he was seeing an old friend. It was that kind of pure joy in his voice.

This letter-identification fascination also came about when speaking was fairly new to him (a few months at most), so there were times when he'd say a letter and I'd wonder if he was trying to say the word and just couldn't. Of course I'd shake my head at how ridiculous that was. But looking back now, I wonder.

He read individual words before he was 3yo, though it's hard for me to say exactly when that started because he would memorize every book he ever looked at. We have a great video of his reciting "The Grinch who Stole Christmas" when he was 2.5yo. Hilarious! So cute!

The first time I know for sure that he read a book he had never seen before was when he was 3.5yo, so by that point, there was no doubt that he was really reading and not just memorizing.

I think he learned whole words at first, but his early fascination with letters and his ongoing skill at sounding out new words makes me think there's something happening phonetically, too. To this day I can't give him those "read aloud a list of words and tell what reading level he's at" tests because he can pronounce even the craziest words correctly. He doesn't know what any of them mean, but he can "read" them.

I don't think that helps you at all, but maybe my observations can be added into everyone else's to make something sensible come out?

DD was the one who memorized books. When she was 3, she wowed my parents by reciting The Night Before Christmas. She didn't learn to read on her own, but when she was three she begged me to teach her. I used Hooked on Phonics and she caught on very quickly. I think we skipped level one, really worked on level two, and then suddenly levels 3-6 were trivially easy. She has had her nose buried in books ever since.

Wow! This is all so fascinating!

We never would have dreamed about teaching our kids to read at a very early age, either. In fact, DH and I used to say "Kids should just be doing play-type stuff before they're five, like stacking blocks and fingerpainting and coloring." Then our three-year-old told us he wanted to learn how to read, our two-year-old wanted to know everything about dinosaurs...and, well, you all know how it goes.

Cheers, Val

Mine learned when she was 3. She asked me to teach her, and I told her she was too young! For the longest time, she thought words were there to describe pictures and that the picture was the real story. So, she'd look at a picture and see some words in the newspaper and ask me if it was this or that word. She'd get very upset if we were reading and the picture didn't have every detail from the words. She was an early entrant to preschool and got exposure to letters and sounds there. Once she knew those, she was better able to guess at the words under the pictures and took off from there.

I learned through my parents reading to me, figuring out phonetics at some point (my dad said that I sounded out words that I didn't know). Whole language did not make any sense to me when I started school, so I continued with the phonetics approach.