Thank you for this post! I was just going to ask something similar
My son has been using LR since he was about 14 months, but we did use flashcards before that and he has always been fascinated by words (and books, we read at least 10 toddler books a day!). We still do flashcards and everyday activity including reading and labelling stuff. However, he is now 23 months and not reading much (he has shown to be able to recognise a couple of words at different times but not consistently).
He is very interested in learning letters instead! I was a bit confused, but I think is down to him being bi-lingual (actually he also had a third language until three months ago) and finding it very hard to figure out two different sets of phonic rules. So now I am continuing to use LR but including more phonics activities. Thank you so much for the link to reading bear, it seems like iit is going to be great for us!
Can I ask you if any of your children were learning to read in two languages at the same time and how did they learn to read?