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Rohit Krishnan's avatar

This is fascinating! Thank you for writing this. We saw both our kids start reading around age 4. Younger one a bit faster because he wanted to do what his brother did. I think they both learnt alphabets first, mostly our fault, and we didn't do much beyond reading with them occasionally, and being around places where reading things are interesting for them: these were mainly museums for us. Which made them also learn words first, animals and dinosaurs facts to begin with, but also planets and general science, and then back-solved to start reading.

An interesting part was that at his Montessori school the teachers told us the 3yo wasn't reading. Turned out it's because they were doing 3 letter simple words, and he didn't care to read those.

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Kim Louise's avatar

My mother did this with me too (although not so systematically - just reading books with me regularly and putting kids' educational channels on TV that happened to teach phonics). She sent me to preschool already reading fluently; the teacher didn't believe her until I read her a printout she'd given me to take home.

In the 3rd grade I tested at an 8th grade reading level, and in high school I scored 790/800 on the reading portion of the SAT without specifically practicing for it. They called me "gifted," but I think I just started with several years of experience reading for pleasure when my peers had little to none, and that early confidence snowballed into further successes. Now I'm a couple years out of college and my job is translating Japanese novels into English.

So although I'm a sample of one, I strongly believe that this approach really does give kids an invaluable head start.

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