DS was a perfectionist at that age and wouldn't read if he didn't know ALL the words on a page but was quite clearly reading along.
I think this was part of my DD10's issue - and fiction is filled with names that sometimes don't follow typical phonics rules and are difficult to visualize. For example, she could read "duodenum" or "esophagus" and a) decode it and b) see a picture of it in her head, but a name like "Leah" would cause her to freeze in her tracks.
I still remember her opening books, glancing at a paragraph, and saying "I can't." I'd look, absolutely stunned. Then I'd scan through the text and see, several sentences in, a character's name.
(pfft - oh for Pete's sake)
I'd point to the name, tell her what it was, and then boom - suddenly she could fly through the rest of the text.
I was really bizarre (and a little creepy, lol) how she could spot names buried in text so quickly.
Anyway... that's all behind her, thank heavens.
DS8, meanwhile, could have written the book on visual-spatial. He could read words like "ambulance" and "intersection" when he was somewhat young-ish (6?), but words like "the" and "own" stymied him well into his 7/8th year. He's finally mastered the little non-phonetic and non-visual phoneme-like pieces.
Reading is supposed to be enjoyable on its own
Yes