My DS6 is quite parallel to Evemomma's description. I don't think ours is quite like Whole Reading as much as complex pattern matching. His guesses at new longer words he encounters are hilarious and sometimes when he makes a faroff guess to a new word, it is much trickier to get him to the correct reading.
And now in 1st comes spelling lists, I tried an experiment with him last night to have him close his eyes briefly and try to see the word before he tried to spell it. Seemed to help, time will tell.
