Phonemic awareness is definitely the key for a great many children, both GT and otherwise. Not everyone gets it without direct instruction (in fact, about 30% do not). Also, even in high-cognitive children, there is a developmental component to grasping PA, which may have its own trajectory independent of other skills. Age four or five is about when it starts to develop in most children.
Sounds like all of those factors, and then some, came together for JBD's DC.
atnight, good to hear that your DC is beginning to have access to text. The lack of reading stamina is probably because she is still laboriously sounding out words, rather than calling any of them automatically, which means a lot of additional cognition and attention has to be devoted to the decoding process. This is normal in developing readers, but should lessen quickly over the next few months.
