Feature #41: Discovery Education

Discovery Education (https://www.discoveryeducation.com) is an online platform offering information on technology and science fields. This website also provides excellent literacy resources, as it features a curriculum that integrates STEM content into an interactive experience for students to engage with online.

In addition to being a valuable literacy resource, it’s important to remember that students don’t just read through traditional text—they also read and communicate through coding. This website offers coding practice, which is itself a form of communication and reading in the digital world. For students interested in coding, this website would be an excellent resource.

*Contribution by Anthony Ponce

Feature #40: The Free Reading Program

The Free Reading Program (https://freereadingprogram.com) is a literacy website designed for users to create accounts for their students, providing them with opportunities to complete various literacy activities aimed at improving their skills. The website offers a wide range of activities, from foundational skills to Level 6 content. Each level includes diverse tasks, such as matching words and reading passages followed by comprehension questions.

Users must create an account to access all the materials available on the site. Signing up requires only an email, and accounts are free. Once registered, users can access resources tailored to the grade level they teach or the reading/literacy level of their students. Teachers or account holders can add students to their account and assign passwords for student logins. The website provides activities targeting various literacy skills, including sight words, which feature word lists and basic vocabulary. Additionally, students can read stories accompanied by interactive activities.

One notable feature of The Free Reading Program is the "play" button, which reads text aloud. This feature is particularly helpful for students struggling with reading and literacy. At the end of each activity, a star rating displays the number of attempts and the percentage of correct answers, making it an excellent tool for tracking progress and evaluating improvements in students’ reading and literacy skills.

As users explore higher levels, the activities become increasingly specific. For example, Level 5 includes vocabulary-building tasks focusing on homophones, homonyms, antonyms, figurative language, easily confused words, prefixes, and suffixes. These activities are particularly beneficial for students needing additional practice in these areas.

This website serves as an excellent supplemental resource for teachers to integrate into classroom activities. With its extensive features and diverse reading activities, The Free Reading Program supports students at all levels, whether they are working to improve their literacy skills or seeking extra practice to enhance and enrich their abilities.

*Contribution by Joanna Ponce

Feature #39: Whooo's Reading

With Whooo's Reading (https://www.whooosreading.org), parents and/or teachers can hold students accountable for their reading and check for comprehension. Students take quizzes generated by the website after they’ve read their book. The parent or teacher can set expectations for quizzes. Rather than just the typical multiple-choice, teachers can choose what types of questions, what ratio of fill-in-the-blank and open-ended questions they would prefer, how often students are to be quizzed, and more!

The website uses positive reinforcement by rewarding students after every quiz. The website also offers activities for students to do after reading. The activities cover a variety of skills like text-to-text connections, vocabulary, grammar, and more.  Whooo's Reading helps track the students' progress, holds students accountable, and motivates them to keep reading!

*Contribution by Jean Perez

Feature #38: Phonics & Stuff

Phonics & Stuff - https://phonicsandstuff.com - offers a variety of useful literacy materials. Upon entering the site, visitors will find tabs for ‘Games,’ ‘Read-Alongs,’ ‘Decodable Readers,’ ‘Teaching Tools,’ ‘Articles,’ and a link to their TPT Store. By clicking on the ‘Games’ tab, users will discover a variety of phonics and reading games, including sound blending, sound-letter matching, reading words, short vowels, spelling, ABC order, and more. These games can serve as valuable tools for students who may need assistance with basic literacy skills but could benefit from a change in activity. The website offers a good variety of resources that support ongoing literacy practice. The site also features decodable readers that students can use for practice. These readers highlight specific short vowels, consonants, word types, and tricky words. Additionally, they can be downloaded and printed, which is particularly helpful for extra practice when students do not have online access. Another key feature of the website is its collection of Read-Along Stories, which are excellent for classroom use or individual student access. These stories allow students to listen to books while reading along, making it a valuable resource for enhancing literacy. PhonicsandStuff also provides various tools for teaching phonics, including resources for graphemes, phonemes, building word lists, creating decodable sentences, and a phoneme reference guide, among others. The website’s phonics articles are particularly useful for teachers who are focusing on the fundamentals of reading and literacy with their students. Overall, PhonicsandStuff offers a wide range of materials that can significantly aid in improving literacy for children and students. The site includes activities for students and provides resources for teachers and parents to help their children advance and enhance their literacy skills. 

*Contribution by Jane Ponce

Feature #37: Word Game Time

Word Game Time (https://wordgametime.com/) is a free website that offers language arts games and homework help. The games are fun and have been approved by educators. The goal of Word Game Time is to help students succeed. The site provides content for kindergarten through 7th-grade students in spelling, typing, reading, geography, and language arts.

Word Game Time features a user-friendly site with content organized by grade, subject, and type. The language arts section includes activities that help students with letter-sound recognition, parts of speech, subject-verb agreement, and other essential skills. Another noteworthy feature is the educational videos, which are fun and engaging for all grade levels. Some videos are animated, while others offer instruction from a teacher.

Word Game Time is similar to websites like ABCYa.com and Funbrain.com. However, what sets it apart is the variety of free worksheets available for teachers, parents, and students. While some sites offer worksheets, the ones on Word Game Time cover a wide range of topics, including poetry, homophones, and dictionary practice.

Word Game Time is an excellent online resource for teachers, parents, and students seeking more variety in online learning and practice. The variety sets this website apart from other online learning games and resource sites. The materials are well-organized and easy to find, making it a site that makes learning fun and engaging.

*Contribution by T. Leon Guerrero

Feature #36: Literably

Literably (https://www.literably.com/) is an online literacy assessment for grades K-8 designed to inform instruction, screen students for reading difficulties, identify students’ reading levels, and monitor students’ response to intervention. The data needed to do this are generated by a student reading a short passage out loud into a computer, laptop or tablet device and answering several comprehension questions.

Literably yields an oral reading fluency (ORF) score. An ORF score measures the number of words a student reads out loud correctly in one minute and is sometimes written as words correct per minute. ORF has the desirable property that, in general, it is valid for the purpose of screening elementary school students for reading difficulties. 

Unlike students assessed under these older instruments, students that use Literably read out loud into a device, typically a tablet or laptop. This is in contrast to the traditional process of an educator sitting with a student one-on-one and noting her errors as she reads. This change in mode of administration saves a large amount of staff time, which can improve student achievement via the reallocation of that time toward instructional activities

To promote content validity, Literably’s passages were selected to resemble the materials that students read in the classroom. Thus, Literably draws its reading passages, with permission, from leveled children’s trade books. Approximately half are excerpts and the remainder are the full book, with the full books concentrated at the lowest reading levels. Approximately half are fiction and half non-fiction. Pictures are available for all passages up through the 3rd grade level. All books were officially leveled according to Heinemann’s Guided Reading framework. 

Literably does have a monthly subscription however teachers are offered a free one month trial. After signing up for literably, teachers then add their student roster into the program. After adding students, teachers can have students take the many assessments to start gathering data. 

Overall, Literably is a great tool for parents and teachers. It is an all-in-one website for measuring a student’s literacy levels. 

*Contribution by Ciera Tuiasosopo

Feature# 35 NAT GEO KIDS

            NAT GEO KIDS https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/  offers readers articles about nature and animals. NAT GEO Kids will definitely be more appealing to younger kids. This website is not just an excellent literacy resource for students, it can also be a very interactive and enjoyable site for young readers. It offers readers information about the animal kingdom. For students who love animals, this is one of those websites they will very much enjoy. In addition to the readers and articles about animals, they also have great educational videos that students will love. This is an effective literacy tool for school-aged children.

*Contribution by Anthony Ponce