Knowing what it's about, knowing the context of those black squiggly combinations of letters called words, knowing the context is everything. O-P mean when they are big and white on an octagonal field of red attached to a slender metal pole at a street corner. Sometimes, children will even remind you as you whiz around the corner that you didn't do what the sign said to do. But it is rarely true that a preschool or kindergarten child will be able to identify the word stop if it appears in the small black print of a newspaper, or even in the story Where the Wild Things Are , when the naughty boy's mother tells him to. It is always in the same place used the same way.
Most children learn to read in just such contextual ways.
If I had read the story of Dick and Jane to Jonathan, he would have known that certain words wouldn't make sense in the context of the story, and he would have learned to trust his judgment about what makes sense. He would also have learned the individual words in the story, because he would have been able to make meaning from them, just as a child makes meaning from STOP as the car slows down. Children can also use the context of their own lives to learn to read. He can read all of these because they make sense to him in the context of his own life, at home and at school. It is very possible that Andrew is remembering the words or memorizing them, and it is certainly true that most of these words do not jump out at him in other kinds of print.