Living abroad - teaching a child to read in English

surround IME, it is easier not to mix up the sounds for younger kids than for yourself, you are transposing an adult point of view to your child. She will probably take it in her stride, and notice the difference between the 2 and be amused. It will definitely not hamper her swedish, unless she already have some trouble with one language.

Here, they teach 2 foreign languages from 3 yo in kindergarden (1 hour of each/day). When the children all learn to read at 6, DD1 and her classmates started to learn to write and read in 2 languages simultaneously with no problem. The adults put you to shame with how many languages they speak almost perfectly.

Wow, thanks for that vesela

One thing that concerns me is how a child (especially so young) can process that the letters make different sounds in different languages. That's the main reason I'm reticent to do very much with DD1, because I don't want to confuse and hamper her progress or her communication in Swedish. (English is very much the second language in our home, we are permanently settled in Sweden and DH is Swedish, so she is only exposed to very minimal English).

Any experiences there?

Here is a good sound chart from the Phonics International site I mentioned above (have just posted same link in Home Ed). In Primary Education there are some kind primary teachers posting reading-related things, which is helpful.

We live abroad and I've been teaching DD to read, using phonics. She's 5.5 now and her reading has just really taken off. It's been a gradual process, fitted in here and there, but very enjoyable and rewarding. She started showing an interest in letters when she was about 2-3, and I just built it up gradually, teaching her the various letter sounds with lots of pencil and paper games etc. (Teach the letter sounds, not the names, and keep the consonants sounding short, i.e. say a very short c, not cuh, because when he comes to blend the letters together it's easier to hear what c-a-t says rather than what cuh-a-tuh says).

At around age 3 and older a good thing to do is to play little games that help them to start hearing the various sounds in a word - what letter a three-letter word begins with, what it ends with etc.

For the how-to-do-it, I bought the Read Write Inc teacher's handbook and the Jolly Phonics handbook - hard to say which one I'd recommend more because neither was ideal (RWI is very classroom-focused). You might want to post on the Primary Education thread and the Home Ed thread to see if there are newer/better resources for phonics teaching at home. There is, of course, also a lot on the internet - people may suggest the Phonics International site, which has some good stuff but can appear overly-complicated.

The one book I wouldn't recommend (but which sometimes is recommended) is "Teach your child to read in X (can't remember how many) easy lessons". The letters and sounds are written weirdly!

www.phonicsplay.co.uk (has a free part and a pay-for part - £12 a year I think) has lots of good online games - some are good for practising hearing the different sounds that make up a word, as I described above.

Re. reading books - it's worth getting a few of the first-level phonics readers (e.g. Songbirds, Read Write Inc's readers) to see if he takes to them when he's a bit older. My daughter didn't - I think because they didn't seem like "proper" books - so we stuck with pencils and paper, magnets etc. etc. until she got to a certain point where she could tackle harder readers that seemed more like books. For a long time, she preferred to read easy little sentences that I had written than a phonics reader. But that's def. a your child may vary area. See what his style is before spending money on lots of readers!

We have a similar situation, though our DD1 is a little older. Watching with interest