Peto's Journey https://www.petosjourney.com/ features engaging books, publishing, games, reviews, resources, and more! They focus on writing the vision and making it meaningful, because their creativity for any project starts with you. Your vision, goal, and desire as an author encourages the Team at Peto's Journey. Their mission is to inspire hope, experience laughter, and love as they create stories that will stand the test of time.
*Contribution by Jarneec Halsey
Storyplace.org. is a digital learning library targeted for preschool-aged students. It is a free website with engaging lessons and icons that are user-friendly. It allows a user to choose a theme that they like. It also includes entertaining animations and voice overs to read along to. Storyplace.org helps readers stay interested and concentrated while reading. Students have the ability to choose the topics to the story, which are all additional mechanisms for engaging the reader that users can make use of. The stories on Storyplace.org are also interactive which may help younger students with shorter attention spans to stay focused. There are a wide range of story topics that include rainbows and colors, animals, fruits, and typical jobs like firefighters. At the end of the story, students have the options to read another story or check out an activity that could be completed online.
Students
may practice reading along with the story or they may listen to the voice overs
in the story while watching the animations and videos. In addition, this
website is not only available in desktop mode, but can also be downloaded on
tablets and other mobile devices. Parents and guardians can easily access this
content at home on their own devices. The app includes many more activities
that are perfect for young learners.
Overall, this would be great for really young children or older children who are struggling with reading comprehension. The passages and stories are very simple and use a format made for primary-aged children.
*Contribution by A. Espinal
The
International Children’s Digital Library Foundation (ICDL) website - http://www.childrenslibrary.org was created
to support the world’s children in becoming effective members of their local
and global community while respecting the diverse cultures,
languages, and ideas throughout our world.
ICDL strives to make the best children's literature available online, free of charge. Another thing to note about
this site is that it is a government-funded website so the content on the site
has been reviewed and filtered.
Even though
the primary audiences for the ICDL are children from three to thirteen years old, parents, children caregivers, and educators, as well as academic professionals working in the field of children’s literature, are also targeted, since these people also
impact the literacy of a child. This website is great for students, parents, and educators, because it has a large
collection of interactive books and they're all free. It is valuable, especially considering its goals of
helping a diverse audience accept all cultures.
Storynory https://www.storynory.com is a literacy website that focuses primarily on original stories created by them as well as fairy tales. What is great about Storynory is that it is free and one can also listen to certain stories through their free audio option for them. What is great about the literacy website is that they also have other points of social media that one can follow and they even have a YouTube. Students and educators can read or listen to more of the podcasts through iTunes and other podcatchers. You can also download the application on the Apple App Store, which has no advertisements displayed.
Overall, this is a website that is both free and informative. We would like our students to have access to as many resources that are both extensive and free as well. This literacy website holds many interesting original stories, such as Lapis, which follows an ancient Egyptian cat named Lapis who is a magical apprentice to Amon the priest. Enjoy, and have fun learning!
*Contribution by A. Ponce
Lalilo https://lalilo.com is an innovative, visually engaging, standards-aligned literacy software program for K-2 students, parents, and teachers. The program supports literacy learning and instruction through interactive and developmentally appropriate exercises for students and extensive data tracking and planning tools for teachers. It supports learning and instruction across all components of literacy, including phonological and phonemic awareness, letter and word recognition, comprehension and fluency, vocabulary, writing, and social literacy.
In the free version of Lalilo, students work on phonics, sight words, word families, reading comprehension and grammar lessons. In the student platform, children “travel” through a world of individualized, self-paced exercises. There is a sequence of lessons and content levels to ensure that students are working on developmentally appropriate exercises, individual needs, and grade level literacy standards. Students receive both positive and constructive feedback, while ensuring they are working on skills that are not too easy or too hard. It can show parents and teachers their areas of strength and growth, while suggesting lesson ideas and offline activities to reinforce skills.
The teacher dashboard organizes and analyzes student data. Teachers/parents can view students’ progress in individual skills and literacy components, create groups of students for instruction, and plan for correlated lessons. Teachers can also assign student levels or particular skills, which are taken into account in the student’s progression in the program. You can view a calendar that shows student individual activity. You can see a detailed view of the activities students completed, how many questions the student answered correctly, as well as how long they spent on each activity. You can also access an error analysis for each lesson. The free teacher dashboard displays all the phonics data. With the premium plan, you will have access to even more student data, such as the data for sight words, word families, reading comprehension and grammar lessons are available too.
The program allows for the student to progress, from sounds, to words, to stories. There are sight words, sentences, stories, and rhymes. The student earns badges after each segment is complete. The questions are not long, they are short, about 3 questions each, and the activity changes, allowing for variety to keep the learner interested. The voice overs are clear and animated tone. It is engaging to the student and sounds friendly. All activities have audio capability. You can even record yourself reading. The feedback given allows for self-correction, it is encouraging, and the learner can also rate how they are doing with the lesson. It is easy to use and it is game-based, and most children enjoy having fun while learning. The student demo is available at this link: https://student.lalilo.com/#/map/3/ready .
TeachingBooks (https://www.teachingbooks.net/) provides resources about children's and young adult books. The goal of the TeachingBooks website is to empower every reader to connect deeply with a book, gain new insights from the author, and experience the joy of reading. The website seems to be more user-friendly for young adults and adults when looking for resources for books. There are book reviews for children ages 4-12 that would be more beneficial for teachers or parents to use, so they can figure out what books are best for their children.
There are tabs with resources for students and teachers. The categories of resources that are available for students are Diverse Books, For Fun, Homework Help, Find Book’s You’ll Like, and Build Your Own Reading Lists. In the For Fun category, some of the options are games, read-along audiobook performances, video book trailers, and meet-the-author & illustrator movies and recordings. You may search for books by author or title. Diverse books are separated by subject, culture, genre, thematic booklists, and series. There are lesson activity videos available to view to get ideas related to the different books.
For teachers some of the categories for resources are Literacy and Standards Connections, Book Promotion, Teaching Ideas, Collection Analysis, and Diverse Books. Teaching ideas features timely topics that feature ideas to support themes for the month. There are also mini lessons and monthly book ideas. The monthly book ideas feature books for a certain grade level paired with ideas for activities to do in the classroom. For grades above fourth it also features activities to study the authors. When looking under Literacy and Standard connections you’re able to find multi-leveled lessons, comprehension, author’s purpose, text complexity toolkit, and world languages. Teachers can find book guides provided with multi-leveled activities which explore book elements which help to support comprehension.
You’re able to get a personal license to use for about fifteen days which gives you access to all resources, custom reading lists, diverse books toolkit, teaching ideas, and more. After the fifteen days, you’ll move down to the basic access which allows you to explore the resources and use credits to access them. You also have access to puzzles, games, book annotations, and chrome extensions. Overall, this website features many books with a variety of resources for each learner.
*Contribution by Leilani Tenorio |
| Image from: www.readwritethink.org |
Flocabulary is a learning platform that utilizes music and rap videos to enhance students' learning across various subject areas and gra...
