The boy who taught himself to read at age 2 and was just accepted into the Mensa Association for the Gifted

Elton GardnerJanuary 23, 2023

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BBC News World

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Caption,

Teddy learned to read just by watching TV.

A boy who taught himself to read when he was 2 years old has been accepted as the youngest member of the international association of the gifted Mensa in the UK.

Teddy, 4, from the English town of Portishead, can count to 100 in six languages other than English, including Mandarin.

Mensa accepts people who score 98 or higher on an intelligence test.

Teddy’s mother, Beth Hobbs, said that your son learned to read at 26 months “watching children’s television and copying the sounds of the letters”.

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Teddy was accepted into Mensa at age 3.

“He started tracing the letters and when we sent him back to daycare after the Covid lockdown we told the teachers we thought he had taught himself to read,” she said.

“We got a phone call from the daycare, which they had sent to a preschool teacher to check and he said ‘yes, he can read!'”

Caption,

Teddy with his mother.

It was the latter that particularly astonished Teddy’s parents.

“He was playing on his tablet, making these sounds that I just didn’t recognize, and I asked him what it was, and he said, ‘Mommy, I’m counting in Mandarin,'” the mother explained.

Caption,

Teddy knows how to count in six languages.

Teddy was accepted as a member of Mensa when he was 3 years old, making him the youngest current member of the organization in the UK.

But her parents said that they want me to have a childhood normal.

“He’s starting to realize that his friends can’t read yet and he doesn’t know why, but it’s really important to us to keep him grounded,” his mother said.

“If he can do these things then that’s fine, but he sees it as ‘yeah I can read but my friend can outrun me’ so we all have our individual talents.”