Encouraging Reading Comprehension

Blue Ribbon offers the Interactives  which are designed to improve word recognition and encourage reading comprehension in readers. These 7  interactives can become a good base for a literacy lesson.

Love Little Critter!

Love Little Critter? Then this place is for you - Little Critter World-Wide Network with coloring pages, the library, interactive activities, songs with downloadable songsheets, storytime movies read by Mercer Mayer,   and, of course, wonderful illustrations that will surely motivate young learners and help them explore the world of these charming creatures.

For Young Explorers

National Geographic presents Young Explorer - a classroom magazine for kindergarten and first grade. It is the collection of interactive books with audio and wonderful pictures. The resource is great to use in class or reading with your child at home - much interesting information - in English! The children will love predicting the story by its title, listening and reading the issues, giving more facts about the animals and plants, revising what animals or plants they have seen discussing what new they have learnt. The fact that each story is read is very important, it helps improve listening, pronunciation, intonantion, and reading skills.

Learning English

Learn English from GCFLearnFree.org is a good way to introduce or practise vocabulary with children. There are the sections: Action, Art, Conversation, family, Financial, Food and Beverage, Geography, Government, Plants and Animals, Quantity, Questions, Science, Shapes and Colors. In each section there are four activities: Word Explorer, Text Explorer, Video Dictionary, Fill in the Blank. Among these activities which are numerous and interactive the teacher can choose the ones suitable for the lesson.

Encourage Reading

We Give Books is a great reading resource "combining the joy of reading with the power of helping others".

We Give Books is a digital initiative that enables anyone with access to the Internet to put books in the hands of children who don't have them, simply by reading online. All of the books available for online reading are children's picture books appropriate for children through age ten. There is a mix of fiction and nonfiction, a range of authors, and an equal balance between read-alouds and books for independent readers. 
All the books are available online after registration. Editor's Picks are free for anyone to read.

 

In Class: Surely the books are worth spending the whole lesson reading: listening to the teacher, reading one after another, reading all together, predicting the story with the pictures, telling after-stories about favorite characters and so on as far as the students enjoy the book. 

Reading

The Library of Congress offers much reading. For kids and teens one can find

The Aesop for Children - the interactive book which contains the text of selected fables, color pictures, video and interactive animations;

The Rocket Book - "The upward progress of a rocket, lit in the basement by the janitor's son, causes some strange situations as it passes through 20 floors of apartments!";

The Exquisite Corpse Adventure with MP3 version of all the episodes: "Ever heard of an Exquisite Corpse? It's not what you might think. An Exquisite Corpse is an old game in which people write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold it over to conceal part of it and pass it on to the next player to do the same. The game ends when someone finishes the story, which is then read aloud.

Our "Exquisite Corpse Adventure" works this way: Jon Scieszka, the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, has written the first episode, which is "pieced together out of so many parts that it is not possible to describe them all here, so go ahead and just start reading!" He has passed it on to a cast of celebrated writers and illustrators, who must eventually bring the story to an end. 

Every two weeks, there will be a new episode and a new illustration. The story will conclude a year from now. To get bi-weekly updates with new Exquisite Corpse Adventure chapters, click on the subscribe link  at the top of the page. "This story starts with a train rushing through the night...." No one knows where or how it will end!"

and many more.