Featured on PBS, Reading Rockets is a David M. Rubenstein Prize-winning website devoted to providing research-based activities that help struggling readers. There is an extensive library of lessons centered on fluency, oral language, phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and other literacy skills. Children can also incite their passion for reading with themed booklists, such "Young Detectives."
Published by the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Storyline Online is an excellent resource for children with learning disabilities like dyslexia. This website records free videos of narrators, and sometimes well-known actors like Eva Longoria, reading children’s books aloud. Students develop their literacy skills by following along with the text as the literature comes alive.
The Wisconsin Media Lab created the Into the Book! website to provide engaging reading comprehension activities in English and Spanish. Elementary children with learning disabilities will benefit from dissecting books, such as The Wolf Who Cried Boy and A Pirate’s Life. Short, 15-minute videos are included to teach important reading strategies like visualization and summarizing.
Starfall is a free educational website with an optional low-cost membership program that teaches phonics. Young children diagnosed with learning disabilities will learn fun activity lessons from letter recognition to reading full-length books. Students can also download swinging sing-alongs, including “Wheels on the Bus,” for fine-motor coordination.
Trusted by over 150,000 teachers, AdaptedMind was established by Stanford graduates for exercises that adapt to exceptional children’s needs. From first through eighth grade, students will discover hundreds of amusing reading and math activities illustrated by goofy monsters. Children will start with a quick pretest before engaging in video lessons and taking a confidence-boosting progress assessment.
In 2000, abcteach entered the Internet world as a free educational website for teachers. Each month, over two million people from around the world visit abcteach for PreK - 8 materials and creative activities for students and educators. The website has over 6,500 free documents available, including printable worksheets, interactive activities, theme units, and much more.
The Paul V. Sherlock Center on Disabilities, founded at Rhode Island College in 1993, is a University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD). Click on the picture for is a list of Adapted Literature available through the Sherlock Center Resource Library. These resources are provided for educators to help students with severe disabilities participate in the general curriculum. Some titles are available in electronic format and can be downloaded directly from this website. Stories adapted to PowerPoint include sounds/music and allow a student to "click" along using a computer and mouse/switch.
CommonLit's adaptive reading toolbar makes the text accessible for students at a variety of reading levels and language abilities. Every passage -- printed in PDF format or accessed online -- includes footnotes with vocabulary words and essential background information that is critical for kids to understand when reading a passage. The included discussion questions get students thinking critically about text during independent reading and beyond. Thinking about reading is further encouraged by text-dependent questions that are included with each passage.
ReadTheory is a K-12 online reading comprehension program that assesses reading ability and builds reading comprehension by providing texts for students to read at a "just right" level. Over 1,000 informational and narrative passages are leveled by grade and Lexile level. ReadTheory's algorithm senses student performance and is able to adapt to fit reading needs. It's web-based and usable on both desktop and mobile devices, so students can access their accounts wherever they are.
Tween Tribune is a free reading resource from the Smithsonian Institute that features topics about animals, fashion, entertainment, school, science, technology, national and world news written by kids and professional journalists.
DOGO News is a superb reading resource that offers a variety of content covering current events, sports, science, technology and more. Each article is kid friendly and contains links to definitions of words students may find complicated as well as text to speech function. Content is free to view. Premium access is also available for worksheets, activities and more that accompany articles.
Science News for Students is an online publication from the Society for Science & the Public, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating the public about science. This magazine includes current events for middle and high school readers, focused on STEM fields like physics, biology, and math. Each article also includes a list of Power Words in accordance with Common Core standards, as well as a readability score.
Sightwords.com is a comprehensive sequence of teaching activities, techniques, and materials for one of the building blocks of child literacy. The site combines the latest literacy research with decades of teaching experience to bring you the best methods of instruction to make teaching easier, more effective and more fun. This website includes a detailed curriculum outline to give you an overview of how the individual lessons fit together. It provides detailed instructions and techniques to show you how to teach the material and how to help a child overcome common roadblocks. It also includes free teaching aids, games, and other materials that you can download and use with your lessons.
