Another Great Children's Story Site

BBC's CBeebies offers the cutest stories, animated and narrated for you and your early reader's listening enjoyment. I wish I'd paid attention to this website earlier, I didn't know what we were missing! Trust me... these stories are precious!

The user friendly website offers stories, games, poetry and more. Your children are sure to get a few giggles watching these stories unfold. Pay attention to the commands as you'll occasionally have the opportunity to mouse over the image and add to the excitement before you!

Some might say it's better to read to your children rather than relying on someone else, and I do agree with this if you're not reading to your child at all, but assuming you are, this is a fun way to add to your child's interest in story telling and reading. Moving images are fun... we all know that! Keep on reading those books as you always have, but every once in awhile, take a few minutes to let someone read to you and your child. The stories feature the story's text as the narrator speaks, so you could even turn the volume down if you wanted to and just rely on your own voice. Either way... you're sure to enjoy your visit at BBC's CBeebies!

Summer Reading & A Free Book for Your Kids!

Barnes & Noble is sponsoring a Summer reading incentive for your children in grades first through sixth! Simply have your children read any 8 books, complete the online journal available for printing from the B&N site, bring the journal to B&N and walla! Free book!

To learn more, visit Barnes & Noble 2008 Summer Reading.

Just So Stories... Free Online!

The Just So Stories were published over 100 years ago, but your kids won't know that! lol They're fun little (some are longer than others) stories you can read in just a few minutes time and each includes a fun rhyming poem towards the end.

Some of the titles:
How the Whale Got His Throat
How the Leopard Got His Spots
How the First Letter was Written
The Cat that Walked by Himself

There are 12 titles in all and you can print them out for free... if you'd like!

These aren't early readers, you'll have to do the reading for them, but that's an important part of learning too! Kids need to be read to daily in order to deepen their love and appreciation for books, story telling, and the desire to read on their own.

Teaching Children to Read... Exceptional Free Online Resource

Wonderful news for those of you teaching your kiddos how to read! I found this wonderful site today while gathering information for upcoming articles and couldn't wait to share. FirstSchoolYears.com offers countless printables to supplement your reading curriculum and nearly everything on their site is 100% free.

The quality of the images are wonderful, not grainy like some free sites offer and the information is completely relevant. The recommended ages for these tools is 4-8, but basically anyone learning to read can benefit.

You'll find a great selection of printables for teaching blends, long and short vowels, digraphs, compound words, homonyms, adding "ed" and "ing" to words and so much more.

Take some time to really navigate through the site. There's a lot there, not just what's on the main page that I supplied the link to above. Use the tabs at the top of the page for word level, sentence level, and text level to find even more free downloads. Some are PDF's, others are links to other pages within the FirstSchoolYears.com website.

About the only problem I found with this site was that it seemed to load very slow. Not sure if that's the norm for the site, or possibly something on my computer causing the delays. However, the time you spend waiting is worth it in my opinion. Hopefully, it will go much faster for you!

Free Online Reading Tutorial

I'd like to share another great schooling link with those of you who either homeschool, or simply have a desire to boost your child's progress. I think you'll find this resource quite beneficial!

DIY Reading Tutor is a Web site for parents wishing to teach reading, spelling & writing at home. There are over 400 free worksheets beginning with teaching letter sounds, letter formation and blending. As the student progresses they are introduced to word building, homophones, spelling rules, high frequency irregular words, simple but useful points of grammar & punctuation.

The worksheets contain small green print. This is the 'teaching dialogue' for parents who are unsure of how to teach. The entire programme is integrated. By the end of day 2 the student is writing their first sentence - with a capital letter (the first word is 'I') and a full stop. There is a 'New User' section to guide you if you haven't used the site before.

The web site contains 'level testing, making it easy to find a starting point. There is a search list for parents wishing to find particular work sheets eg 'punct (" ")' or 'ea as in bread' etc. The FAQ section offers a brief description of confusing terms such as 'phonological coding deficit'. You will find links to other useful sites and a 'helping hand' section to assist with letter reversals and auditory confusions.