Our DD didn't start reading until about 6.5 from what I remember.
She could sight read a few words and certainly convinced us that she could read before that. I discovered to my horror that we had been fooling us one Saturday morning. I sat down with her and spent about a tear filled hour with; I knew that she knew the letters and their sounds so I showed her how to 'sound' the words out, explaining some exceptions like 'th' and 'sh' etc, every time I saw her guess I made her go back to the top of the page and start again. It was a very short book about a boy and his red dog and I felt like Dr Mengele for persisting but something inside told me to continue.
A light must have switched on in her head because after that morning she took off like a rocket, Egyptology became an obsession, Greek mythology came next, she descended on the Percy Jackson books like the wolf upon the fold and by her 7th birthday had read the Harry Potter series too as well as the Hobbit.
As I have related before, I convinced myself that I was the Ultimate Reading Teacher until about 18 months later when we had to get our DD tested and we discovered her DYS level LOG - which literally sublimated, in the physical sense, my hubris there.
