My first and third boys both memorised favourite book passages/books just before starting to read.
They both used the memorisation to work out which word was which from what we can tell.
Aiden struggled with phonics in reading, but the letter sounds made sense to him (possibly something to do with the school making him re-learn things he already knew ages ago?). I could say "c-a-t" and he would just repeat "c-a-t" he didn't know how to blend the sounds. If I showed him the word - he knew it was cat. The forced phonic lessons at school totally killed his delight and love of reading, and his displayed ability to read declined drastically while at pre-school/K. He figured out the phonetic sounds on his own only recently and it has helped his confidence in new material greatly.
Dylan (child #3) reads easy readers and loves demanding we write out lists of names and words he knows. Phonic sounds make sense to him, he blends and can sound out words and heard the sounds and make the word. He has recently discovered word families and is delighted at same sounding/looking words. I think he is still an emerging reader as to me, a reader is a child who can take a book and read it.
Child 2 - Nathan is a whole other kettle of fish. I have no idea of the process he used to start reading. As with everything else, he asked me to teach him, I sat down with a simple book and he read it to me and then asked for a trickier one, which he then read as well. Shortly thereafter he was reading whatever took his fancy. He is 5 now and prefers juicy story with interesting pictures. It's getting harder to find books that meet this criteria but that's another story for another thread.
