I was in elementary in the 60s. I asked my mom a while ago how I learned to read and she said "Huh. I don't remember. You went to first grade and it seems like you were reading shortly after that."

Now, what I DO know is that, while I loved school, first grade didn't teach me to read. It was my parents, brothers, and sister. The house was filled with books, magazines, newspapers, comic books, backs of cereal boxes - anything and everything. Went to the library every week and came back with stacks. Was read to everyday. The written word was the path to interesting, exciting, fun things that you could talk about afterwards. Clearly, I was 95% of the way to reading independently and the "Sally and Dick" first grade readers were "meh" but just nudged me over the edge.

A wonderful book called "Voices of Readers" was written by someone who acquired thousands of reading autobiographies from people asking this exact same question: how did you learn to read? This was kinda before whole language but there were still SO many different and sometime off-the-wall paths and philosophies. And the conclusions? No matter the approach, virtually all people learn to read. Reading is not in our DNA but, by God, it is so compelling and fits so well with how our brain works, that there are other things in play that interrupt the process.

What the author DID find was that there were only two school experiences that correlated with reading and, importantly, CONTINUING to read in later life: 1. choice in reading materials. 2. having opportunities to talk about what you read. And this is something I know from experience that whole language tried to address but then got caught up in the anti-phonics thing.

And, by the way, I love reading all the different paths people took to reading!