I love Daily 5 and the structure and independence it allows my kiddos to have in their learning. During our Listen to Reading time, my kids currently have access to a wide variety of books on tape and CD. I have one tape player and 4 personal CD players (thank God for rechargeable batteries!) I also let my kiddos use the Tumblebooks apps I have on my iPod Touch. These are all wonderful but obviously cost money to purchase and maintain. With so many great free online resources, I began a quest to find free, online resources for books for my students to enjoy.
In a previous post I mentioned an awesome site called Sqworl. The more I use this site, the more I love it and the more uses I find for it. It has definitely become an organizational addiction. Sqworl was the perfect tool for the resources I found and over the past couple of weeks I created a new Sqworl for my firsties to use during our Daily 5 Listen to Reading rotation. Feel free to check it out by clicking on the image to the right.
My plan is to save the Sqworl link on my desktop so my kiddos will have easy access to the site. There are some great resources here but I am especially excited about the nonfiction selections that National Geographic Young Explorer offers.
If you have a Sqworl account and you're interested in accessing this Sqworl instead of creating your own, you can add it to your group page by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page, locating the gray box, and clicking on the heart. This will add the Listen to Reading group to the bottom of your group listings page.
I don't know if you've seen the following blog, but it is great! Here's a link to the post she did last week about online stories: http://technologyrocksseriously.blogspot.com/2011/04/online-stories.html
ReplyDeleteI've added them to my class website and the kids can use them during Listen to Reading along with the iPod's and Listening Station.
-Andi
http://pencilsglueandtyingshoes.blogspot.com/
Love it! I am a follower and plan to use it for my firsties. Thanks for sharing your hard work!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for sharing this with everyone. This is a great resource. I don't know if you could add tumblebooks, but that is also a wonderful website. Here is how I link my students into that website - which has hundreds of fiction and non-fiction stories. Plus, stories in English and Spanish. http://www.kid-writers.com/reading
ReplyDeleteAlso, Starfall is great with beginning readers because it sounds out the words: http://www.starfall.com/n/level-a/learn-to-read/load.htm?f
Sacha
http://luria-learning.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the additional sites everyone! I have also used Tumblebooks- mostly on my iTouches. It seems when I link to it through the sites I use to get in free, the links don't work. I'll have to try yours and see what happens. Thanks for sharing!!!
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