Websites and Apps
My Recommendations:
This app includes leveled nonfiction for students, along with activities that help them build their comprehension.
This is my go-to app for introducing a new topic or allowing a student to practice a concept. It is an interactive lesson platform. You need 1:1 devices, but it has hundreds of ready made lessons on all sorts of specific topics. You can also design your own lessons or edit a downloaded lesson to suit your purposes. It allows you to teach a low prep, highly effective lesson. The best part is that you can monitor individual students' work subtly, and the app keeps data records for you.
Also comes with tons of ready-made lessons and assessments. It's a way to give an informal assessment or review on any topic or skill in a "game show" style manner. Great for engagement. You can make your own assessments or use any of the assessments already on the server.
This is an app that you can put on your phone or any device that allows you to scan the bar code of any book and instantly find the level of that book. A must for saving time.
This will allow you not only to look up the level of any book, but to find book suggestions based on level, content, author, genre, or similar titles. Very useful when trying to find appropriate books for a student or build a class library.
The entire site is worth checking out for great lesson resources, but I particularly like the various apps for ipad. They drill basic reading, phonological awareness, and phonics skills, but make it seem like a game. The apps are even engaging for older remedial students because of the way the games are set up. I have a 10 year old remedial reader who frequently asks for "the slingshot game", one of the choices in the alphabet sounds app, which is really just a simple reinforcement of different letter patterns and sounds.
Peekaboo Studios- Reading Comprehension: This app comes with 20 passages per grade level, both fiction and nonfiction. It guides the student through the reading and prompts them to answer various comprehension questions as they go. Best of all, it tracks their progress and talks them through wrong answers to help them understand how to better answer that type of question in the future.
While subscriptions are required for this site, many schools have them or are willing to get them. This is one of the most complete resources of levelled readers for every level, accompanying comprehension activities, and data keeping software. The accompanying app, RAZ-Kids, is engaging for students and allows them to continue to build reading skills on their own.
This site has an amazing assortment of ready-made lesson plans and activities aligned to standards. Not only useful for reading, but for all subjects. While payment is required for many resources, there are also many that are available for free.
This app helps struggling readers build inference skills. They read short scenarios and choose between several possible inferences. The app starts out easy to build confidence and familiarity and slowly guides the student into answering more difficult inferential questions.
Garfield Fact or Opinion: An engaging way to get students to practice the difference between fact and opinion. Students read Garfield Comics and use the information to answer fact and opinion questions.
Accessible Literacy Learning (ALL): A systematic phonics program, specifically targeted for students with disabilities. There are a number of other materials available as a part of this program as well. The app breaks apart basic skills, such as blending, and guides the student through them. There is a free play mode and a teacher assisted mode. While the full version is paid, there is a relatively substantial free version as well that focuses on blending.
Homer Reading: This app lets you customize a student's lessons based on their individual interests and abilities. It allows you to enter a student's name and age, add interests, and answer questions to determine an appropriate reading level. The app then personalizes all lessons for the student (uses their name in it), and creates activities that target their skills while involving their interests in the content. You can save several student profiles on the app. There is also a Homer Stories app that goes along with it and features a nice library for the student to peruse.
A-maze-ing Sentences: I like to use this as a reward game. Students "drive" the ipad to collect the words in the correct order to make a sentence. Has a fun under the sea theme and reinforces basic sentence structure.
Words with Friends EDU: Just like regular words with friends, but the teacher has the ability to customize it and create classes to play one another. Great for older students who need spelling, vocabulary, and letter pattern reinforcement.
Bob Books Reading Magic: Easy Readers broken down by word families and phonic concepts, with animation that helps promote engagement. There is also a free "lite" version.
iSpy Montessori: A great phonological awareness game for beginning readers. It requires students to listen to sounds and find the image that starts with (or ends with, or contains-based on the setting) that sound.
Endless Reader: An engaging app for beginning readers. It adds a multi-sensory piece, which helps struggling students. Very visual with fun graphics and sounds. Introduces students to common sight words and helps them manipulate the sounds in those words. Requires them to match up letters to their sounds, so it helps them with their initial letter-sound correspondence. The letters all "talk" their sounds.
Word Cookies: Great for helping students recognize different letter patterns and sounds that letters can make in words. Students swipe the letter cookies to create words for the "cookie sheet". They earn points for each word cookie they bake.
Newsela Student: Allows students to alter the text level of articles on their own and provides appropriately leveled articles to your student.
Dr. Seuss Treasury: This app includes several animated Dr. Seuss books read by actors with background music. Students can listen to the actors read, read themselves, or track the reading as they hear it. It is a good way to scaffold them into independent reading. If a child clicks on a word in the "Read to myself mode", that single word is read aloud. If you buy the full version, you get access to all of Dr. Seuss's works.
Recomended APPS
