Educational CyberPlayGround

Free Books, Best Reading Games, Resources and Children's Books

Find the Best resources for both reading games, traditional Language Arts and interactive Childrens Books Online that integrate technology into the classroom.

Best resources for both traditional Language Arts and modern communications sites and applications on the web.

FREE BOOKS

1) University of South Florida has an amazing program called Lit2Go, in which they have public domain books narrated by professional voice actors[0]. I have had mixed results with the quality of librivox recordings, though I very much respect and appreciate people who are willing to attempt it. Lit2go is wonderful quality.

FREE PUBLIC DOMAIN AUDIOBOOKS

Librivox also gives a significant boost to text-to-speech and speech recognition research, currently librispeech corpus based on librivox is the largest and quite useful corpus of spoken English.

PODIOBOOKS.OM

The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, concerning the kingdoms and marvels of the East:

READING CHILDRENS BOOKS ONLINE

FACT: The average cost of a school library book in 2006 is now over $20, and schools should be purchasing two books per student per year to keep their library collections current. Even with state funding, most schools are not purchasing two books per student per year.

Smories.com Smories are original stories for kids, read by kids

or try Old Mother Hubbard

 

Do Babies Learn Vocabulary From Baby Media? Study Says No

NBC's 'Today' show recently suggested that claims from the manufacturers of baby media products may be overblown, and now a new study published in Psychological Science presents empirical evidence that infants who watched an unidentified baby video did not actually learn the words that the video purported to teach.
The researchers, led by Judy S. DeLoache of the University of Virginia, recruited 96 families with children between 12 and 18 months of age to participate in a month-long study. Some children watched a best-selling infant-learning DVD several times a week, half of them watching alone and half with a parent. Another group had no exposure to the DVD, but their parents were asked to try to teach them the words from the DVD in everyday interactions.
Before and after the month of vocabulary work, all of the children were tested on their knowledge of a list of words that appeared in the DVD. The results were clear: Those infants who regularly watched the DVD over four weeks learned very little from their exposure to it, regardless of whether they had watched alone or with a parent. They knew no more of the words from the DVD than did children who had never seen it.
This aligns with DeLoache's earlier research showing that very young children often don't understand symbols that are perfectly obvious to adults. Infants who watch DVDs like the one used in this research may not relate the images on the screen to reality. 2010 http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/206553.php

BUILD
Reading SKILLS

Shakespeare's Plays from Folger Digital Texts
"Timeless Texts” and “Cutting-Edge Code,” culled from the words of the Bard. This code refers to the source code that users can download from the site, allowing interested parties to develop new noncommercial Shakespeare projects and apps. To get started, visitors can access the Read a Play feature.

Youtube Video's to look at - read and listen to.

Starfall - Learn to Read using online tools with phonics. For preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Exciting phonics games and online interactive books.

Online Nursery Rhyme Cards
To encourage both the school-home connection, as well as the positive influences of families reading together, this site offers more than seventy illustrated nursery rhymes to print as cards and send home with students. They can also be used in the classroom, collected, reviewed, and sent home as a little book.

Children's oral history - playground rhymes found in newspapers - 39 page PDF

Get a Reading Chart for your Classroom

Skills Checklist for Kindergarten:
Mouse / Keyboard - What Smaller Hands Need. Safe educational resources to use with children ages 2 through 6. FREE PRINTABLES AND COLORING BOOKS - GAMES - ABC's - Music and Song

FIRST GRADE PRACTICE SKILLS ONLINE

AUDIO BOOKS
HEAR BOOKS
and / or
READ ALONG.

AUDIO BOOKS

2 ORIGINAL E - BOOKS Read and Hear FOLKTALES
A Brother Anansi and Brother Tecoma Stories spoken in Standard English and Negerhollands English. See Story Telling and Folktales

Teacher Recommended Activities AND BOOKS

REMEMBER AUTOGRAPH BOOKS?
Why not revive this forgotten tradition in your classroom. This is an autograph book, from Valparaiso, NE dated 1900. It appears to have been the property of Miss Etta Seedlund. This book is old and dark, with all entries done in pencil, therefore, I have scanned all pages, and then transcribed the inscription, as best I can, below the scanned image.

Teacher Recommended Literature Resources

LITERATURE GUIDES

GUIDES

K - 12 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. In the guides, the magenta text indicates the language (or context-appropriate equivalent to the language) of the content standards.

Children's Literature Comprehensive Database
300,000 MARC records, and over 20,000 reviews.

CAROL HURST'S LITERATURE SITE
http://www.carolhurst.com/index.html Book reviews, practical literature extension ideas, themes and professional resources

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE WEB GUIDE - Books, awards, authors, resources, lessons and ideas for the classroom - more comprehensive than most and layed out for getting in and out quickly

DIGITAL LIBRARIAN - Online catalogue of titles by subject area; online book reviews, periodicals, articles and data bases at your fingertips - completely searchable.

CLASSICS ARCHIVE - Select from a list of 441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors, including user-driven commentary and "reader's choice" Web sites. Mainly Greco-Roman works (some Chinese and Persian), all in English translation

CONCORDANCES OF GREAT BOOKS An Index to the Great Books in English Translation With Links to Online Editions if Available

LEGENDS - History, literature, and lore presented with the promise of guided access to primary source material and up-to-date scholarship, personal essays and extended reviews, and historical surveys and thoughtful commentary.

TOOLS

LINGUISTIC FUN PAGE - http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/
 Looking for a new twist to many of the English topics we tirelessly attempt to impart to our students?

BEHIND THE NAME - http://www.behindthename.com/
An introduction to etymology and first names, as well as languages, elements in first names, and the most popular names - interesting possibilities for word study.

ACRONYM FINDER - http://www.mtnds.com/af/
 Searchable database containing common acronyms and abbreviations about all subjects, with a focus on computers, technology, telecommunications, and the military; 61,000 acronyms & their meanings.

Banned Books Books Suppressed or Censored by Legal Authorities

S.C.O.R.E. CYBERGUIDES Supplementary, web-based units of instruction centered on core works of literature. They are designed for the classroom with one online computer; each CyberGuide contains a student and teacher edition, objectives, a task and a process by which it may be completed, teacher-selected web sites and a rubric

SONNET CENTRAL - An archive of English sonnets with commentary, pictures, and relevant links on the WWW

SURFING WITH THE BARD Over 200 pages on this site alone plus links, discussion boards and more all dedicated to Shakespeare's genius

Find venues offering either seasonal flu shots or H1N1 shots
EXPERTS OFFER FREE "FLU" INFORMATION FOR ETHNIC LANGUAGE COMMUNITIES.