Mom taught me phonics (1960ish)
When in the Second Grade I was checking out “The Wizard of Oz” from the Library, the Librarian didn’t think it was a suitable book for my age (6 or 7) and asked me to read from it, I read her a page and she said “Well I guess I was wrong”
She wasn’t, I was the oldest of *6 and I neglected to keep it from my siblings that proceeded to deface it with color crayons... folks had to buy the book. I had it until about the 8th Grade, then lost it among other things when I discovered Girls.
TT
*Mom had 6 kids in 5 years, (twins) ;^).
That's pretty impressive!
I started first grade in 1942, two months before I was six. We had no such thing as "kindergarten" and we had never heard of "phonetics." As I said, I had to invent my own.
I had exactly the same kind of experience with the town librarian when I wanted to check out "The Last of the Mohicans" by James Fenimore Cooper, but later she sarted ordering books for me.
In your day, my oldest son was reading stories to his brothers and sister, reading the text upside down so they could learn to read while he was tutoring them in it. That was about 1965.
He was so far ahead of me, at the equivalent age.
Just sayin' that given the tools, a young child should be permitted/encouraged to rapidly develop while the mind is still inquisitive, expanding asymptotically, and malleable, to find his/her own creative way to deal with a world that wants to put them in a pedestrian straitjacket.