My brother taught me to read when I was 4 or 5 (sometime before kindergarten). No one knows how (including he or I). He was tired of me asking him to read to me, so he taught me how to read so that I would leave him alone.

My exact experience.

All I know about my reading is that I was apparently reading the newspaper at age seven, but that does not appear to be a mean feat in these parts.

My parents taught me to read when they got tired of reading me the same book over and over. Education as self defense is more common than I'd originally imagined.

I went from not reading to reading almost instantly .1st grade? the bad thing, I never figured out phonics. Therefore, I can't spell.

Or that is this week's excuse

I learned how to read when I was four. I had hardly any friends my own age, and I was surrounded by older people who spent pretty much all their leisure time with books in their hands.

I did end up fitting in poorly with my peer group in school, so the early reading didn't necessarily do me any favors.

Tendon pain is ... not easy to miss, I will say. Fucking tendons.

(Of course, she was also the only one of us with any kind of social skills, so it's possible she was just out having friends while the rest of us hid in our rooms and read. We still thought she was weird.)

Cause she was. Socially ept freak.

I somehow learned how to read at 4-nearly-5 years old. My mom came home and found me reading a book out loud and thought, "Oh, how cute, she's pretending to read that book." Then she realized it was a new book and not one I had already memorized. She double-checked with Dad to see if he had read it to me, and when he said he hadn't, she pulled out the flash cards, which I breezed through.

We figure it was a combo: genetics (Mom's dad was a bookaholic, too--she still sees him in me whenever she watches me read a book), Sesame Street (started when I was three), older sister playing school with me, and parents always reading to us every chance they got.

I was completely ignored, so like others here, taught myself to read out of boredom. BUT I distinctly remember my school in Hawaii calling MOT into counseling and persuading her to authorize all kinds of tests for me because I refused to sound out words. I was given a battery of tests; I recall Rorsharch (sp?) and various IQ tests. I flunked one test that the counselor was giving me, because I was reading the answers (upside down) that were lying on the desk in front of him! So they told MOT that I was a problematic cheater.

She said "she's reading the answers upside and backwards from 4 feet away? She's obviously able to read and doesn't need to sound out shit."

I edited to add the part where she said "shit" to the counselor, because I remember she got asked to leave. Heh. And the teachers stopped asking me to sound out words and just let me be to read.

I do remember that my parents didn't teach my sister to read, that she learnt it in school. Which confused them, because whichever method they used on me (not phonetic, if memory served) was not the one she was taught, so they were perplexed as to how to help her properly at home.

How do they teach parents to support what's going on at school?

I was also what is called a "spontaneous reader." Some children watch the page while they're being read to and the connections just click. I was left to myself a lot because my sister was so sick, so I just read anything I could get my hands on. I could read when I went to kindergarten, and when the teacher started pointing to letters and saying, "This is Mr. A and this is Mr. B," I thought they were crazy. I spent the first couple of years of school being bored absolutely to tears and acting up. I can therefore testify that most children couldn't really read until they were at least 7. Eventually, I refined my reading behind the desktop skills.