Free or low-cost books

First Book First Book is a non-profit that provides new books and educational resources to schools and programs serving children in need, from birth to age 18. The benefits of registering with First Book include free books from the First Book National Book Bank, low-cost books and resources from the First Book Marketplace at 50-90 percent off retail price, and potential funding from First Book’s corporate partners and generous donors.

WNDB in the Classroom To help children find stories and authors that they can relate to, We Need Diverse Books’ program WNDB in the Classroom provides free diverse books to schools serving low-income students around the country. Contact classroom@diversebooks.org for more information.

Better World Books Better World Books receives books from libraries, booksellers, book drives, and through community Drop Boxes, and then sells what they can to raise money for literacy, donate books in good condition, and recycle the balance. Make a request to become a donation recipient.

Literacy Empowerment Foundation LEF’s Reading Resource Project offers free books to recipients who can pay shipping, handling, and administrative costs. Reading Resource Project books come in sets of 100 books per set and any literacy-based effort qualifies for these books. You do not have to be a school or teacher to qualify.

Little Free Library A Little Free Library is a place to find a book or bring a book to share! Find Little Free Libraries in neighborhoods all over the world, all with different offerings. Anyone may take a book or bring a book to share.

Free Books to Read Online

Epic! Epic! is a digital reading platform for kids 12 and under with more than 35,000 thousand high-quality and award-winning fiction and nonfiction books, audio books, and videos from 250 publishers. Epic! is completely free for teachers and librarians.

International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) The non-profit International Children’s Digital Library identifies exemplary books that help children to understand the world around them and the global society in which they live and makes them freely available on the Internet.

Free Audiobooks and Video Read Alouds

KidLit TV Children can experience authors and illustrators reading their works through KidLit TV’s Read Out Loud program, which includes an array of titles featuring diverse people and cultures. Find more read-alouds, plus podcasts, activity ideas, book trailers, and more at their award-winning website.

Storytime from Space Story Time from Space is a project of the Global Space Education Foundation, which sends children’s books to the International Space Station. While in space, astronauts record themselves on video reading these books to the children of Earth and share them on the Story Time from Space website.

Storyline Online The SAG-AFTRA Foundation records well-known actors reading children’s books and makes graphically dynamic videos so that children around the world can enjoy favorite stories, such as The Kissing Hand, A Bad Case of Stripes, and Stellaluna.

Julie’s Library Join Julie Andrews for story time! Julie and her daughter, children’s author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children’s books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too..

Lee & Low Storytime Publisher Lee & Low Books has a growing library of author read alouds which include several titles read in Spanish.

PBS KIDS Read-Alongs PBS KIDS offers families a place to come together and read along with favorite titles read by celebrities, including Michelle Obama, and PBS KIDS authors.

PBS Books Storytime PBS Books Storytime is a resource developed by the PBS Books channel to offer author read-aloud stories and book features for educators, libraries and families. The segments feature children’s book authors and others in “Read-Aloud” segments and/or video features on new and best-loved children’s books.

Goodnight with Dolly “Goodnight With Dolly” features Dolly Parton reading aloud titles from the Imagination Library. Snuggled in bed with her Imagination Library book, Dolly shares stories that are just right for this moment in time.

Read, Wonder, and Learn! Author Kate Messner has compiled growing collection of resources from favorite authors and illustrators that include everything from first-chapter and picture book video read-alouds to drawing and writing mini-lessons.

Lit2Go Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 format

Book Distribution Programs

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library The Dolly Parton Imagination Library is a unique book gifting program that mails a brand new, age-appropriate book to enrolled children every month from birth until five years of age, creating a home library of up to 60 books and instilling a love of books and reading from an early age. The cost of the books and the mailing is typically financed by community businesses, school districts, civic organizations, individuals, or local government.

Reach Out and Read Reach Out and Read is a nonprofit organization that trains and supports medical providers who give books to children and advice to parents about the importance of reading aloud at well-child exams.

Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) RIF’s flagship Books for Ownership program ensures that kids living in poverty have access to new, free books of their choice and participate in reading motivation activities.

Additional Resources

In Search of Free Books, Reading Rockets’ roundup of sources for free and low-cost books.

Where to Find Free Audiobooks and Digital Text-to-Speech Books for Your Child from Understood.

A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS has played an indispensable role in building the United States, yet the nation has not always welcomed all new arrivals. Its history is marked by periods, like the present one, of hostility, restrictions, repatriation, internment and deportation. Take, for example, the coerced repatriation during The Great Depression of more than a million people of Mexican descent to Mexico; 60 percent were U.S. citizens. Or the relocation and incarceration in concentration camps during World War II of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, the majority of whom were U.S. citizens.

Following are examples of lesson plans and classroom resources on the historical context of immigration, detention, deportations, and reparation:

• Immigration History Research Center: Teaching Immigration with the Immigrant Stories
  Project Lesson Plans.

• Public Broadcasting Service: Identity, Immigration and Economics: The Involuntary Deportations of the 1930s
  Lesson Plan, Resources.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum: Curriculum Guide – Japanese American Internment
  Distance Learning, Activities, Teaching Tools, Teacher Workshops, Student Resources.

• Public Broadcasting Service: They’re Coming to America: Immigrants Past and Present
  Lesson Overview, Lesson Activities, Video Segments.

• Public Broadcasting Service: Identity, Immigration and Economics: Involuntary Deportations of the 1930s
  Lesson Plan.

• Digital Public Library of America: Japanese American Internment During World War II
  Teaching Guide, Classroom Activities, Resources, Tools.

• Public Broadcasting Service: The New Americans
  Downloadable Lesson Plans.

• Smithsonian Museum of American History: A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans & the U.S. Constitution
  Classroom Activities, Bibliography Web Links.

• National Public Radio: America’s Forgotten History of Mexican-American ‘Repatriation’
  An interview with Raymond Rodríguez, coauthor of “Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s,” and professor of American history and Chicano studies at California State University, Los Angeles.

• National Archives: When the “Enemy” Landed at Angel Island: San Francisco Immigration Station Sought to Bar Hostile Aliens and Deport Resident Radicals During World War I
  Magazine Article.

• American Psychological Association: Disrupting young lives: How detention and deportation affect US-born children of immigrants
  Research Overview.

• U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: Trauma at the Border: The Human Cost of Inhumane Immigration Policies
  Investigative Report to the U.S. President, Vice President and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Additional advocacy tools and partner sites:

• Support immigrants and beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

• NEA’s Classrooms Not Cages pledge calling on the U.S. government to end the detention and criminalization of immigrant children and their families.

• Home Is Here

• Protecting Immigrant Families

• Informed Immigrant

• National Immigration Law Center

• United We Dream