Some kids just pick up reading the way you did.
Two of my kids did the same.
My third child is not like the other 2. She has speech and language problems. She is actually very good at memorizing sight words, but there are too many words to memorize all of them.
First, my daughter couldn’t hear the differences in the sounds the words made. She had to be taught reading rules, so that she could read.
She did a multi-sensory, Orton-Gillingham reading program called Barton Reading. After she did that for 2 years, she became a good reader.
Barton is a good program, particularly for teachers who are not necessarily language therapists, but have students who need the Orton-Gillingham method.
It sounds like you and your child worked very hard to overcome the language processing and phonological processing difficulties that are so typical for those possessing language-based learning differences.
Congratulations on finding the necessary resources to help your child learn to read.
So this is what’s interesting to me - why was it easy for me and not easy for others? How do we fix it and make it easy for everyone? (Cause, really, it isn’t hard to learn to read) And, doggone it, with the internet and everything else we’re dealing with today, how do we bring back even the slightest sense of literacy?