This paper explores young bilingual children's early literacy in three parallel literacy classes in Watford, England and examines a small group of young children making sense of their literacies in three different languages and literacy classes. It identifies the ways in which the teachers celebrate their pupils' learning and locates the celebration in the schools' value framework. The celebrations take on different forms - the children enjoy them all! - but they also reveal how the schools and teachers have very different views of children as learners. Rather than feeling confused about the different languages and literacies, the parallel literacy experiences enable the young readers to see clearly the differences between the practices - the salient features of each practice as they see them - and to demonstrate that they can 'do it'. This paper draws on a longitudinal, ethnographic study that follows the literacy progress of a small group of British- Pakistani children who move between three schools. The paper is based on a socio-cultural view of learning and literacy and it analyses the learning experiences of five bilingual children who are of second or third generation Pakistani background. At the start of the study the children are five years old and they attend the same school and class. They learn to read in English during their daily literacy lessons; their home language is Pahari. They attend weekly Urdu lessons that take place in a community language school. They also learn to read in classical Arabic - in a language they do not speak or understand - in their daily Qur'anic classes and, typically, in the local mosque. Traditionally, the theories of early literacy have not focused on the simultaneous process of learning to read in two or three languages. In most theories the starting point is a monolingual child - typically a middle class child - who learns in his or her home language. When second language literacy is considered, it is commonly viewed either as a process of learning to read in a new school language, different from the home language, or as a consecutive process - school literacy following home literacy. One of the aims of this paper is, therefore, to raise mainstream teachers' and researchers' and policy makers' awareness of early simultaneous literacy and of community language schools and to begin to recognise these schools as a valuable domains of learning.