FREQUENTLY USED SITES:
Unite For Literacy: Read stories in a variety of languages
Duolingo: (For parents and students needing to learn English. ) This website provides a placement test and is available to learn an additional language or to learn English.
Children's Multicultural Library: Listen to books in a variety of languages online!
Starfall provides fun, early language and literacy experiences for children.
PBS KIDS is an online learning tool from PBS that offers numerous interactive games, printable coloring sheets, educational videos and music activities for young children
Houghton Mifflin English Grades K-5 Kids Place This is a quick way to practice vocabulary and grammar usage.
Time For Kids This fun, interactive news site from TIME magazine categorizes current events articles and activities by grade level and includes games, trivia, and a homework helper. This is a great resource for working on non-fiction reading.
National Geographic for Kids Kids News highlights news, features, and science articles on subjects of interest to kids. This is another great resource full of age appropriate, non-fiction reading materials.
ABCya.com Free educational games modeled from primary grade lessons and enhanced to provide an interactive way for children to learn. Grade level lessons incorporate areas such as math and language arts while introducing basic computer skills. Many of the kindergarten and first grade activities are equipped with sound to enhance understanding.
Vocabulary Games! Practice with letter sound exercises and word building activities.
ELL Brain Pop: Games and resources to build English language development.
Speak a Boos Enjoy 10 free audio/ interactive picture books online!
Book Adventure Have your child enter the Kid Zone to play spelling and word identification games based on their level. Search for books that you child will enjoy and the site will produce a quiz about the story to check for understanding! Great for comprehension and word identification.
ESL Games Plus: This website has various activities related to building vocabulary and language skills.
Teachers First: This website has several games related to building language experiences and also offers activities in a variety of languages.
MORE INFORMATION:
Research for Parents on Literacy:
Read every day! The more a student reads the better reader and writer they will become. Students can read independently, read aloud to someone, or listen to someone else read aloud. An excellent resource for parents to help with the understanding the importance of reading aloud and selecting appropriate books for students is: The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease. He also has an informative website for parents: http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/
Predictable books for emerging readers: These stories invite children to make predictions or guesses about words, phrases, sentences, events and characters that could come next in the story." --Mary Jett Simpson, Reading Resource Book
A great list of predictable books can be found online at: http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/childrens/predict.html
A Child Becomes a Reader: Proven Ideas from Research for Parents, Kindergarten through Grade 3
Write every day! The more a student writes the better writer they will become. Students can keep a notebook to draw/write in daily. As students get older, they can use the notebook to write you letters. When you read and respond to their letters, you can ask them questions that require them to think more deeply about their topics and provide more details in their response. An excellent resource for parents interested in how we write and learn to write is: Radical Reflections by Mem Fox.
She also has an informative website for parents: http://www.memfox.com/radical-reflections.html