maverick - thanks for the link, looks very interesting.
mrz - DD1 has been at full-time Spanish-speaking only infant school since she was 2yo. Little by little, over the last 3 years they have been introduced to the idea of reading and writing. First, when they were 2 yo they used photographs to symbolise their coat pegs, boxes for storing toys, the 2 sub-groups in the classroom etc, the idea being that children learn to 'read' symbols and pictures long before they can read actual words, then the following 2 years they did lots of work with geometric shapes which led in to learning the shapes of the capital letters (the theory is that capitals are easier to learn first as there is less variety in the way different people write them than with the lower case letters).
At this point, around 4 - 5 yo, they were doing work that involved finding specific letters in magazines and cutting them out, word searches (recognition of the shapes of the letters rather than reading the words) etc. The work in the school is project based and when the children wanted or needed to write something the teacher would write it on the whiteboard and they would copy it. The children were also gradually given more and more responsibility for counting heads at roll call and writing the date on the board etc, counting the children in younger classes in order to tell the cooks how many were present in the school for lunch etc.
They never sit down and do 'reading' or 'writing' as such it is just sort of an intrinsic part of whatever else they are working on.
Spanish is a lot easier to learn to read and write than English tho' - there are no dipthongs or different ways to pronounce the same letter depending what letters are next to it. 'A' is always 'ah'. 'O' is always 'oh'. Spelling is simple.
DD1 enjoys sounding out words and writing down words but when she tries to transfer what she knows about Spanish spelling and letter sounds to English the result is a little muddled.
I think we'll try the Level 1 Floppy's phonics books and see how we get on. We should know by the middle of next month which school she'll be going to and then I can ask them for more specific information about the level they'll expect her to have come August and how we can achieve it. I don't want her to be sidelined because she is behind, tho from what I've read on MN she is more likely to get extra help than be left to flounder!
Also she is so enthusiastic about reading that she seems to be making progress even with little intervention from me!
Thanks, sorry this is so long...