Reading, Literacy, & Language Arts Sites

This page is one small part of Good Sites for Kids!

4Kids Games  Various good math and language arts games.   We found these games to be loud, fast, and good.

Arcademic Skill Builders has math and word games ready to play online. You may recognize some games from the '80s and '90s here. Seem to remember playing them on TI99s and Apples, and they are still good for today! Worth your time to look these over.

Ask Doctor Grammar At last! Your grammar questions answered online! From questions of common useage to the exotic, it's probably in here.

Australian Slang   Part of a larger kids site, learn why English speakers are divided by our common language.

BBC - Literacy Place Another good language arts site, with links to activities for different ages.

Baldwin Project  is a large collection of public domain literature for children.  This includes everything from about 1880 to 1922.  There is some pretty good stuff in here, all online. One example is the original Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Kipling, with the original illustrations, part of the Jungle Book (which is also in here).  Thousands of stories and hundreds of books are included.  A real treasury! Warning: Be aware that the world 100 years ago was quite different. Some people would now label some of these works as racist, violent, too Christian, etc. You are the adult. Read them first. It's still a wonderful collection of "kid lit" and we are happy to include it here.

Bembo's Zoo A nice little site to teach ABCs. Really good animation and sounds!

Between the Lions The site from the PBS Kids TV show. Full of language arts games and reading. Some very good phonics exercises here! We had fun teaching 1st graders with this site right after they watched the show on PBS.

Books and Stories from Kids' World. Ten literature and writing links, and six links to read-alouds.

BooBah from the UK. This site is for preschool folks. Lots of color and sound. Good fine motor skills training, using a mouse. Windows users will need to teach the difference between left and right clicking, though. Educational Freeeware has an excellent writeup on them here, with screenshots.

Brain Teasers  Here are 22 early learning games also suitable for Special Education use.  Memory Attention games "are designed to exercise the processes involved in attending to and remembering information."  Sound Discrimination games "work at training the basic fundamentals necessary for language, listening, and reading." Sounds like a novel and overdue approach.  (and the games are kinda fun)

Children's Books Online - The Rosetta Project   Said to be the largest collection of illustrated antique books online!  Oodles of stories indexed by reading level.  Click on To the library under the yellow Rosetta wagon.

CyberGuides From the site: " CyberGuides are supplementary, standards-based, web-delivered units of instruction centered on core works of literature. Each CyberGuide contains a student and teacher edition, standards, a task and a process by which it may be completed, teacher-selected web sites and a rubric, based on California Language Arts Content Standards."

Dance Mat Typing "Learn keyboard familiarity and finger positioning as you work your way through 12 different typing lessons. Animated characters and dances are triggered by your very own ten fingers." Four levels starting with new beginner. Another great BBC site.

Diagramming Sentences Once upon a time, all grade school students were taught this. Like Latin, it's coming back into style in the educational community. Benefits include a better understanding of sentence structure, better parsing, better writing, and better public speaking. This page contains a decent Power Point about diagramming. This site, "Sentence Diagramming" starts at a much lower level and might be easier to understand for younger or less literate students.

Houghton-Mifflin's Education Place: Spelling and Vocabulary. Here are nine literacy games, each one with dozens of activites sorted by grade! Even if you don't use this publisher's textbooks, you must see all of these. Some kids even look for these games online after school!

Free Rice  "For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger." Over 49 BILLION grains donated so far (November, 2008.)  Improves vocabulary! Have one student stand by with a dictionary while another plays.

GameGoo from Earobics. Loud, flashy games that teach literacy concepts: antonyms, synonyms, poetry concepts, spelling, letter-sound corespondence, word order, fact v. fantasy, letter recognition, alphabetic order, and following directions. Very good stuff. Thanks to Mercedes Phelps for finding this one.

Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples Ok, this site is a little above most elementary kids. It's a good source for language arts teachers, debate, or oral interp.

Guide to Grammar and Writing from Capital Community College, Hartford, Connecticut (This site is) For teachers and senior high and college students. Learn ALL about grammar here. (This is an) Excellent resource.

Harcourt Language Arts preview site Very good site by the Harcourt publishing people. Lots of chances for online grammar exercises here! All sections are great, but our fave is still Grammar Practice Park.

Johnnie's Story Page  has plenty of links to web stories for grades K - 8, including a Spanish section.

Kids on the Net   A fine literacy site for kids and their teachers from all parts of the English speaking world. Site includes: Writing With a Difference, with online stories written by elementary and middle school classes, story starters, and ways to contribute; also a teacher section and more. Authors and Reading has links to children's lit authors for kids to check out as well as teacher links. Good, practical advice for beginning authors here. Tell Us About It lets kids give input. Teachers shows teachers the various parts of the site. All these sections have Activities, too. There are some wonderful things in this site, go investigate!

KidsSpell from KidsKnowIt. "Our fun, and high-paced spelling games help you practice your spelling words. You can pick from over 400 spelling lists, or create your own custom spelling list. All games will then use the spelling list you have loaded." About time we had a good spelling site around here.

Lakota Legends  Links to 17 Native American/First Nations legends, or folk tales if you prefer. You won't see these anywhere else online. From the Acta Lakota Museum at St. Joseph's Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota.  We have visited the Acta Lakota Museum and we recommend it to you.

Language Guide Want to learn alphabets and vocabulary words from other languages? "LanguageGuide.org offers free sound integrated resources for learning languages." The site features pictures of various things with written and spoken names in several languages. Words are pronounced by volunteer native speakers. Current languages are English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese. Sponsored by Language Guide, a registered non-profit organization, the site is free to use but they do ask for donations. Uses QuickTime.

Latin Lessons This webpage is a list of online Latin lessons and (mostly) online textbooks. We urge you to try some of them out by exploring this site. We looked at several and were impressed. Latin seems to be making a comeback so here is your chance to check it out. One of the many language pages offered by A to Z Home's Cool Homeschooling, one of the sites on our Homeschool page.

Launch Pad: "Where Young Authors and Illustrators Take Off! is a new literary & arts magazine devoted to publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews and artwork by children ages 6-12." This looks pretty good. A place where young artists and writers can show off their work!

Literacy Net This is a great interactive site for learning letters, numbers, shapes, and colors! Animated, with sound. Also in German, French, and Spanish!

Little Explorers English Picture Dictionary  from Enchanted Learning, the Zoom sites people.  Here is an illustrated elementary-level dictionary.

Meet Me at the Corner, "Virtual Field Trips for Kids, is a dynamic, interactive site, which encourages individual expression and participation through video submissions from children worldwide, featuring their special corner of the world. Through these video pod casts we hope to create a community of children, who learn the art of self-expression and storytelling through video." Great idea and wonderful site!

Nassau Library Kids Section Tons of information. Site has very many links, just click on a section and look.

Owl & Mouse Educational Software Great phonics software that reminds us of the old MECC Apple games of the 1980s. Free software for you to download and install, or play online. Their plug: "Help your child learn with games, software and educational activities from Owl & Mouse Educational Software. Early reading software—phonics software, alphabet games, and Dolch sight words in a fairy tale story. All of it FREE!'

PIZZAZ! People Interested in Zippy and ZAny Zcribbling! "PIZZAZ! is dedicated to providing simple creative writing and oral storytelling activities with copyable (yes, copyable!) handouts for use with students of all ages. Permission is given to use these resources for in-class, non-profit use only." Site is in sections by genre - 11 different types of poetry, eight fiction activity links, other activities and resources. Also a Teacher section with links to sites like TESOL/ESL and Deborah Healy's Tech Tips.

Root Words Quiz "You make new words from a root word by adding a prefix or suffix. Test your knowledge of root words in this quiz." Good online quiz with three levels for grade 3 and up. From BBC Skillwise.

Screenshot of Roxie beating you at Go Fish.

Roxie's ABC Fish is a computer version of the venerable children's card game. Practice upper and lower case letters, numbers, and a surprise music composition program at the end! Thanks to its publisher, Latticework Software (thanks guys), Roxie is now freeware!

Sesame Street Still helping little ones, since the 1960s. Their site has oodles of activities about letters, numbers, coloring, music, eating healthy, and much more. Let kids click and explore! Some activities require Java or Flash. Others may be slow on Firefox.

Spelling Match from Houghton-Mifflin. Elementary school spelling game makes kids match words with their missing letters. Indexed by grade level.

StarFall Fantastic phonics-intensive site for pre-k through second grade. Stories, movies, and games! Progressive levels let kids read or be read to. Every time we go to this site with K-2 kids, we find something new and great! This site WILL keep those busy little brains going for a whole computer lab session! Thanks, Tia.

Visual Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online    Why go to Google or Wikipedia for all your info?

Wacky Web Tales from Eduplace (Houghton Mifflin Education Place.) About 100 online mad libs! This is great for kids to improve their literacy and have fun at the same time.

Web English Teacher Project based learning K-12. Language arts only. Very many, perhaps hundreds, of lesson plans and related ideas for the entire language arts spectrum.

Web Word Find from Houghton-Mifflin has 21 online word searches. The first three are on the front page, click More Word Finds in the lower left corner to see the rest.

Webster's Online Dictionary  with Multilingual Thesaurus Translation "Earth's largest dictionary with 90 modern and 10 ancestral languages."

Word Builder from Houghton-Mifflin has spelling and phonics activities for grades 1 - 6. From 27 - 30 activities per grade level are listed, matched to textbook levels. Really good information here, of increasing difficulty to match progress through the school year.

Word Girl from PBS Kids. Vocabulary builder for upper elementary.  Funny! We especially liked the Adventures of Word Girl and the activities in Huggie's House of Fun!

WriteSite An interactive language arts and journalism project for middle schools, developed by ThinkTVNetwork, Dayton, Ohio.