A lot of parents worry that teaching two languages at once will confuse a young child, or slow them down in both. It's a reasonable worry, but it's not really how it plays out in practice. Children who grow up around two languages generally end up comfortable in both — they just need the two languages introduced in a way that connects them, rather than treating them as two separate, unrelated subjects.
Open a typical bilingual flashcard app and you'll usually see the English word on one side and the Urdu word on the other, with no real link between them beyond "these mean the same thing." A child memorizes the pair without necessarily connecting either word to the actual object.
What works better is saying the English word, showing the picture, and then explaining it in Urdu the way you naturally would if your child asked "yeh kya hai?" — not as a translation exercise, but as an actual explanation. "Apple — yeh saib hai, ek meetha phal" sticks a lot better than a flat A=B pairing.
This one surprises parents, but code-switching — moving between English and Urdu within the same sentence — is completely normal in bilingual households and doesn't hurt language development. If anything, hearing "this is a very بڑا elephant" models exactly how the child already hears language spoken around them, which makes the lesson feel familiar instead of like a foreign classroom drill.
Because Urdu tends to be the home language, it's easy to assume it needs less attention and English needs more. In practice, both need consistent exposure — English mainly because it's the medium of instruction in most schools from an early age, and a child who's shaky on basic English vocabulary going into Prep or Class 1 will spend the first term catching up instead of learning new material.
Ten to fifteen minutes a day of a short, spoken lesson — a letter, a number, a set of animal names — read aloud in both languages, followed by two or three quiz questions, builds more real progress over a few weeks than an hour-long session once a week. Consistency matters more than duration at this age.
None of this needs to be complicated. Talk to your child in whichever language feels natural in the moment, let a little bit of both mix together, and be consistent. That's really the whole approach.