- You will have to be the judge of the effectiveness of the programs for your daughter, but my understanding is that LR is not meant for and not most effective for children your daughters age. I could be wrong (someone, please correct me if I am), but at your daughters stage of development, LR is probably a helpful supplement
to another program.
Before you began EL with your daughter a few months ago, what was her exposure to books, reading, math, phonics, etc? My daughters previous experiences with such materials and concepts would’ve guided my preschool choices for her.
Can your girl speak English and Chinese? What 3rd language are you thinking of introducing and what is the reason that you are introducing it?
I am assuming that yours daughter is fluent in English (to an age appropriate level) and that her only exposure to Chinese is LR Chinese, because I don’t know your case. Nevermind, I just checked and see that you do speak Chinese with your daughter. If I were you, I would build up her Chinese, and wait to introduce a 3rd language, just because you say she is leaning toward English more than Chinese yet Chinese is her heritage, a beautiful language and it will be infinitely easier for her to grow up with the language than re-learn it later. I would prioritize Chinese over her other languages, since you live in an English speaking community and she will be in French Kindergarten, Chinese would take precedent if I were you.
Your daughter can definitely handle 3 languages, all normal 4yos can. But there needs to be a frame of reference to her exposure. If she isn’t familiar with Chinese and English already, I would probably work on building up her reading skills in English and her passive understanding/conversational skills in Chinese. I would introduce reading in English through more phonetic means, but I would really try to pump up her Chinese speaking abilities.
For reading, I might alter her reading program. I would use a phonics driven, literature rich approach.
I would look into the following 3 books:
The Reading Lesson
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons
The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading
I would pick one of those books and begin working through it with my daughter and use other things to supplement our main program.
DVD’s are great, but we teach kids to read so that they can read pages, so while I would invest some time in quality reading/phonics DVD’s, and bookmark ReadingBear.org I would also get some readers (Bob Books, Now I’m Reading, Progressive Phonics, I See Sam, Ladybird Readers, etc…) and make a habit of reading some simple books together daily.