All three of my children have been "late" readers, relative to level of giftedness, not national averages for age necessarily.
My eldest had significant dyslexia and a major delay for any child, let alone a gifted child. And in fact we were told more than once "Children this delayed don't ever recover to age norms, they fall further and further behind, the recovery is the clearest sign of her ability at the moment". She's now reading well in advance of her age, has been for some years, and is in fact 15k words into writing her first attempt at a novel.
The middle child learned the alphabet at 2 but didn't progress to reading until it occurred to me to put her in front of readingeggs.com at 4.5yrs, where upon she ripped through 60 levels in a weekend and progressed rapidly from there. I guess she was my "most advanced" reader for age.
My youngest child learned the alphabet in and out of order and started pointing out letters out in public by 18 months old, and also did not progress to reading. She looked perfectly average with her progress to reading through K (which she started at 4y10mths) and finished the year just barely at the national benchmark for end of K. I am quite sure she's not dyslexic, but she does probably have a relative weakness in phonemic awareness. By Mid yr 1 she was reading independently, three quarters of the way through yr1 I had her do the DORA test online and she came up with a mid gr6 reading level.
I have concluded that none of my kids take to decoding naturally, they're all quite dreadful at learning times tables too. Their learning to read is entirely comprehension driven, they can read words in context that they could never read from a list, and they struggle most horribly with words like "it" "and" and "the". As soon as they reach critical mass they improve at an exceptional rate.
