My parents told me, that I've learned to read before I came into the school - by car-badges. When we made walks around, I was only interested in the cars standing in the street and wanted to identify them. So I've hardly tried to read the letters of the badges.
At my last visit of a good friend (he has 4 little children), the oldest, 8-years-old boy has tried to combinate words with letters of VW-bagdes (the newer ones have single letters). His father owns a spare-part-shop.
He was not satisfied, because he needed some "E"'s and "N"'s.
His parents weren't happy, when I got the idea, how to help the child: "Hey, your neighbour can be helpful" (a popular German actor
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_du_Mont ).
A Phaeton stands in front of his house.