Speakaboos!

One of my favorite things to do during the holidays is go through my delicious bookmarks and review the education sites that various people have recommended to me. Today I explored a real gem called Speakaboos! The site’s about section explains:

Speakaboos brings classic children’s entertainment into a digital world. Beloved characters and treasured stories are given new life through amazing celebrity performances, beautiful illustrations, and original music. At Speakaboos, children develop literacy skills while learning about technology in a safe and fun environment.

Take a look at these Speakaboo video story favorites, fables, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, folk tales and lullabies. Each animated story is read by celebrities such as Kevin Bacon and Jeff Donovan and contains illustrations by these fabulous artists. In addition, the text of each tale is displayed on the screen as the story is read making this a great site to keep on hand for computer time and/or center time during your K-1 literacy block.

Curious? Check out this video of Jack and the Beanstalk! In addition to the animated story, the site provides accompanying spelling, illustration and word search activities for young readers and a story guide for teachers and parents including comprehension, discussion and extension questions, as well as research activities and notes on this particular adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk.

In addition to providing dozens of stories, take a look at these literacy activities. Pretty soon the site will enable readers to record and share their own tales! Hopefully the site will add more social bookmarking and sharing tools soon as well!

Bravo Speakaboos! What a great site!

Anna

PS Thanks to my husband and mother-in-law (an ESL curricula and teaching specialist) for introducing me to Speakaboos!

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Mr. Lyons’ Kindergarten Class

During my week at the Florida Education Technology Conference, I met two very resource-savvy literacy/technology teachers. I was so excited to chat with them because they had a fantastic running list of literacy resources on the Internet. One of the resources they recommended to me was Mr. Lyons’ Kindergarten Class. I like this site because it is filled with downloadables like these word walls. Since February is coming up, why not print out Mr. Lyons’ February Word Wall for your students so that they can learn about Abraham Lincoln, groundhogs, pennies, quarters and more!

Thanks Mr Lyons.

Anna

A free early literacy resource to pass along…

Since this is my second official post, I suppose I should introduce myself as well!

My name is Anna and I work at Wireless Generation, a New York-based education technology company that focuses on developing early literacy and math instructional tools and curricula. As a developer of early literacy products, I spend a lot of time in K-3 classrooms across the United States observing teachers working with budding readers. I then take ideas and feedback from teachers back to my office where I work with a team of developers to create useful products that help teachers teach young children how to read. Before becoming a product developer, I taught early literacy classes to children and English conversation classes to adults in Osaka, Japan.

I would like to share with you a web site that is near and dear to my heart, as I have been working on it for the past year with my colleagues, as well as with many teachers across the States, but particularly in New York…

www.Free-Reading.net is a free online early literacy program that helps educators teach early literacy skills—in particular phonics and phonological awareness. The activities and sequences can be used to support a typical core or basal program or as part of word study time for teachers using a balanced literacy curricula. In addition, the site provides an opportunity for teachers to share their great ideas and activities.

Here are a few links on the site that I think literacy teachers will find particularly useful:

• Picture cards that contain illustrations of words for every letter of the alphabet.
• Sounds pronunciation guides for words broken into onset-rime, phonemes, etc.
• Hip hop music by Flocabulary that can be used to teach vocabulary words from popular books.
• Videos of teachers demonstrating lessons on the site.
• Dozens of fun decodable passages that can be used to help children learn how to sound out CVC words and words with letter combinations such as th, kn, oa, etc.
  
• Lots of cool lessons (for an example click here) added by teachers like you!

I hope you enjoy the site!

To K-3 Literacy Teachers Around the Globe!

Welcome to our blog! As frugal and creative K-3 reading enthusiasts we are always sharing fun and free reading resources on the web with each other. This blog is our attempt to share useful ideas, activities and downloads with K-3 reading teachers across the globe.

We hope you find our blog posts useful and we welcome you to post your teaching stories and great-teaching-finds-on-the-web as well!

Sincerely,

Anna and Melissa