http://www.web-pop.com/portal.html

The "Web-Pop Portal" (http://www.web-pop.com/portal.html) website is designed for "web-enhanced reading adventures." The site is great for parents and teachers alike. The website offers great features such as a "book-pop", "link-pop", "parent and teacher pop", "beta book pop", "mail-pop", and "art-pop" links. The "book-pop" link offers parents or teachers online books and stories to assist with enhancing the student's reading abilities. The user also has the ability to purchase books online, hear the author tell their stories, and the chance to email the author's with questions you may have. The "link-pop" link is great for teachers. It allows you yo play and download your favorite songs. This link is also great for children because they have the chance to check out "Barbie", "Theodore Tugboat", "Rugrats", and other children friendly characters that will gain their attention. The other links mentioned above share the same qualities as the aforementioned. They are all designed to assist parents and teachers with enhancing their children's reading ability. Something that stood out about this website was the "Stephen" characters Zibbies and Dunebug. The "Zibbies" feature was an additional website that had games, toys, and other items to help with developing a child's literary skills. "Dune Bug" is a very entertaining online story about life in a zoo. Overall, I would suggest this site to any parent or teacher who wants to help children to read.

James W. Jarvis

Phonological Awareness

Phonological Awareness
Our group explored websites that have emphasis on phonological awareness. There are activities and games that children can do, and teachers and parents can utilize. I hope they are helpful to all of you guys!

1. Readinga-z
www.readinga-z.com/phonics/index.html

The website focuses all on phonological awareness and phonics. This program uses direct and explicit instructional strategies for teaching phonological awareness and phonics. Reading A-Z provides instructional resources for teaching the sounds and symbols of language and their relationships to one another using 30 phonological awareness lessons and 68 phonics lessons. The website is broken down into eight different sections: Phonological Awareness Lessons, Phonological Awareness Assessment, Phonics Lesson, Phonics Assessment, Phonogram Flashcards, Decodable Books, Read-Aloud Books, and Sound/Symbol Books. Each lesson provide teacher and parent many resources they can use with their kids. In the Phonological Awareness lesson children are taught to notice, differentiate, think about and manipulate sounds – from sounds of words to sounds of individual phonemes. Some of the things the lessons focus on are blend syllables; manipulate initial sounds, segment syllables and onset and rime. Phonological Awareness Assessment is where the children listen for, identify, discriminate, and produce sounds. The assessments cover rhyme, onset and rime and syllable awareness. The phonics lessons contain worksheets that focus on consonants, short vowels, and word families, blending of sounds, long vowels, open vowel, vowel digraphs and other vowel patterns. There are two phonics assessments available. One assessment focuses on the child’s ability to associate a sound with a given symbols which covers decoding simple CVC words. The second one focuses on the child’s ability to decode nonsense words which is blending, long vowels, digraphs, and diphthongs. Phonogram flashcards are usefully in teaching word building. The flashcard focuses on the five short vowel sounds. Decoding books can be useful with a child who needs practice decoding the sound/syllables relationships in words that they have already learned. The read-aloud books help children hear a certain sound that they have been working on. Sound/Symbol books let the children read by themselves while they focus on sound/symbol relationships. All of these lessons are great to do with kids who are struggling and kids that are not struggling. The more practice a child receives the better they will understand the sounds of the letters and how the letters work together. There are so many opportunities to practice certain phonics and phonological awareness on this website. It is a great website for parents and teachers who want their children to become better readers.

Evaluated by: Ashley Chumchal


2. Half Pint Kids
www.halfpintkids.com

The website, halfpintkids.com is a wonderful tool for parents or teachers to use with children to help them with their emergent reading and activities for phonemic awareness.
Half Pint Kids has "readers" that a parent or teacher can buy that are fun to read, easy to decode and affordable. The readers were written by a Kindergarten teacher so they are both practical and effective as each word was carefully chosen. The readers are based upon the principles of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Half-Pint Readers introduce only a few sounds or new skills at a time while providing lots of opportunities for practice before adding more skills. The books are centered around a theme and each book builds upon the skills of a previous book.
Half Pint Kids also has over 30 different activities that can be done with a child to go along with the readers. Some of the activities prepare the child for reading while others give instructions on how to teach and blend sounds. After the child has mastered the skill, there are games and activities to review and practice that skill.
The downside to this website is that the readers are not free. They are for sale on the website along with several games and activities to reinforce phonemic awareness.
Overall, this website has many great free activities to do with a child to get them started reading. Whether you plan to buy the readers or not, the website offers valuable information, games and activities that would get any child ready to read!

Evaluated by: Callista Young


3. Free-reading
www.freereading.net/index.php?title=Phonological_Awareness_Activities

Freereading.net is a fantastic website with numerous resources and activities for students and teachers particularly dealing with phonological awareness.
There are five tabs including, Core Activities, Educator-Contributed Activities, About Activities, Teaching Tips and Resources.
Under Find Activities there are many resources including- Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Comprehension, Vocabulary, Fluency and Writing.
If you click on Phonological Awareness there are numerous activities for building students phonological awareness, these activities are ordered in skill level, so once your students master the skill you are able to scroll down to a new level. Each activity provides explicit directions and details and some also provide a video of the activity or skill being learned. Some of the activities are identifying and generating rhyming words, body part game, counting words in a sentence and blending syllables name game.
Under educator-contributed activities there are over 70 other different activities for phonological awareness.

Under about the activities there is a complete overview on the importance of phonological awareness, two important manipulation skills are:

• Oral segmenting, which refers to taking spoken language and breaking it into separate parts. Phoneme segmenting, for instance, teaches students that words are composed of sounds, which they need to understand in order for sounding out to make sense.

• Oral blending, which refers to taking a sequence of sounds and putting them together to form spoken language. Phoneme blending is what students will need to do when they sound out words to pronounce them correctly. And information provided by the national reading panel.

The teaching tips tab provides great strategies and explanations on the lessons and activities that are very helpful. And the last tab which is resources provides picture cards that you can download, sound pronunciation guides in mp3 format that provides the recommended way to segment words into onset-rimes and phonemes

Freereading.net is a very useful tool for educators and great learning activities for students. It is also a collaborative website where you can share lessons and ideas!

Evaluated by: Jennifer Porton


4. PBS Spelling Games
http://pbskids.org/games/spelling.html

PBS is a great resource for young children’s learning. I particularly explored the area, spelling. It was such a wonderful website because how it delivered the phonological practices for kids. I mean, it was fun to go through different games/activities because of its rich sound and visual effects. The activities are animated so colorfully and more than that, the narrator’s exciting intonation was what grabbed my attention the most. I think children would not feel boring doing these activities even though most of them are similar. What they do is, in the spelling section, the narrator tells the sound of the letter for them to guess the correspondent letter that eventually makes up a word. For example, the narrator says, “Which letter makes the sound “p” pig?” And then the child has to choose the letter. When they get right, the narrator encourages the child, saying comments such as “Sensational!” There are different levels, which I thought it was good. In each game, there are always directions read from the narrator in fun background music, that children would never get bored. The only downside is that you might need to dig and choose what games to do according to specific practices you want children to learn. And there are a lot of activities other than the spelling part.
I had such fun time exploring it, and I am sure the kids will enjoy them, and teachers and parents can use them, pulling up this website to do the activities together and have some fun learning the sounds of the letter!

Evaluated by: Yire Lee

Books to Assist with Reading and Second Language Acquisition

All of the following resources have books that assist children with reading and second language acquisition. Each website has a variety of books that can either be purchased to read aloud to children, or provide guided reading to children, by highlighting the words as the book is read out loud. The books are also illustrated so that children can understand the gist of the book through pictures regardless of their reading ability. Some of these websites have books read out loud in different languages as well. All of these resources can be used at home or in the classroom, and are entertaining for children as well as adults.

RIF Leading to Reading: http://www.rif.org/kids/leadingtoreading/en/leadingtoreading.htm

The acronym RIF stands for “Reading is Fundamental.” Although the parent website (http://www.rif.org/), offers a variety of resources as well, this branch off (Leading to Reading) is particularly helpful. The theme is “where young children discover the joy of reading and grownups enjoy the journey.” Providing books and literacy resources for young children between the ages of 0 and 5 years of age, the site can be accessed in either English or Spanish. There is also a link for adults, providing them with books, activities, articles and advice, and other resources to help them assist young ones with early acquisition.

The first link is for babies and toddlers (ages 0-2 years). The children can choose from “Stories,” “Nursery Rhymes,” “Lullabies,” or “Games & Finger Plays.” The “Story” section has several different books that are illustrated and read out-loud. As each word is read, it is highlighted. This helps the children recognize the words as they are spoken and written. The “Nursery Rhymes” section has several different nursery rhymes that are read aloud. Although the words aren’t highlighted as they are read, they are printed on the screen so that children can see what the words look like. The “Lullabies” section has a variety of children’s lullabies that are sung in either English or Spanish (or both). The “Games” section has several different matching games, a game where children can play instruments, and a game where children can hear animal sounds. Finally, the “Finger Plays” section is an area where adults are acting out different songs and rhymes such as “I’m a Little Teapot,” “Pat-a-Cake,” “Five Little Monkeys,” and many more.

The second link is for preschoolers (ages 3-5 years). The children can choose to either “Read,” “Sing,” “Play,” “Doodle,” “Explore,” or “Meet Riffy & Rita.” The “Read” section is very similar to the babies and toddlers stories; however, the stories are more advanced. The words are highlighted and read out loud as the child reads along. The “Sing” section has a variety of songs and is really entertaining because the songs are illustrated and animated. The words are also highlighted as they are sung. The “Play” section has a lot of different games and activities for the children. Some are the same as the games for babies and toddlers, but there are some that are more interactive such as “Supermarket Spree,” a game in which the preschooler can fill their cart with different groceries. The “Doodle” section has a coloring book, where children can color online, a scribble pad, where children can draw online, and printouts so that pictures can be printed and colored on paper. The “Explore” section has videos and facts about different kinds of animals such as elephants, frogs, blowfish, and several others. “Meet Riffy & Rita” is basically a playhouse for preschoolers to meet the characters associated with “Leading to Reading.”

One strength of this resource is that it is very user-friendly; children should be able to do the activities and read the books on their own or with minimal assistance at a very young age. As you move your mouse over each link, a child’s voice tells you what the link says. This is helpful for children who can’t read the links yet. It is also entertaining and interactive. Children should find the activities enjoyable, which will encourage them to read and enjoy reading at a very young age. Another benefit is that the website can be accessed in both English and Spanish. This is predominantly useful for children whose first language is Spanish. Although it does not provide books in any other languages, it is also useful for helping children that are struggling with English because it shows spoken and written English, as well as illustrations that assist with understanding. On the Spanish site, the links are said and written in both Spanish and English. This is really beneficial for children’s second language acquisition. All of the resources on the Spanish site are culturally relevant, and vary from the ones provided on the English site.

Although this resource is not geared towards school-age children, it is wonderful for parents to use at home, or for can be used in day-cares or preschools. As a preschool teacher, I would probably use this website for in-class readings and activities. If I had the materials available I would project a story for the children to listen to and read along with. We would listen and read along in both English and Spanish. I would also have them do some of the activities and games on their own and allow them to choose what activities or games interested them. We could also listen to the songs in both English and Spanish and learn to sing along. Furthermore, there are printouts available, such as printable coloring pages with words and illustrations, which I would have the children color in class. It would also be useful to inform parents of the website so that they could take advantage of this resource as well.

Leading to Reading illustrates good teaching because it allows the children to do things on their own, and promotes their independence. At such a young age, children need to be encouraged to read and enjoy reading so that by the time they start first grade, they have the tools to lead them towards success. This is a great website to help youngsters achieve confidence and independence in their literacy acquisition!

(Evaluated by Clare Cryar)

Bilingual Books for Kids Inc.: http://www.bilingualbooks.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=0

Bilingual Books for Kids Inc. is a great website for bilingual readers at different levels. This site offers lists of bilingual books and activities for all ages. The focus of this site is to provide many titles in these lists that you can purchase straight from the web page. This is a pro and con of the website.

On the main page is an index of categories, each with their own description. These categories provide for a simple and easy way to navigate through the website. Each category is a button you can click on, which takes you to another page that has detailed lists. These details include title of the book or activity, a summary, a picture, number of pages and the price. You can buy these products straight from the website or you can look for them in your local library, if you don’t want to buy them. Parents will love this site because they won’t have to do a ton of research to find good quality educational books and activities for their children.

The con of this website is the lack of interactive material for kids. This site was not really designed for that, however it can be used in classes with L1 and L2 students. Students can look up bilingual books to read and even further if they are interested in a certain topic, the sites categories may provide books of specific interests. There are books for students learning Spanish or English. Also the library can use this site to order books for bilingual students. It would only be beneficial for students if these books were in the library.

As a teacher, an assignment I could have my students do is to find 3 books from the site that are of interest to them and then choose one to share with the class. The site is easy enough for students to use and everything is packed into one location. Another assignment students could do is to all find a different book in the same category to share with the class. You can teach that topic and then back up the material with books, for example poetry. This site provides books that will help L2 learners with their vocabulary as well as how to relate material from the L1 to the L2 like Universal Grammar believes. Besides vocabulary, students can learn about an array of things such as colors for younger students and relationships for the older students.

I think this website is a gold mine. It has so many books that it would take a while to read them all and the website isn’t limited to just one type of student or one interest. It even has a place at the bottom where you can select a price range if you are interested in purchasing any of their products. Some of the highlights of the site are the categories for infants, ABC’s, 123’s & Colors, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, games, poetry, and books for adults. Teachers, Parents, and students will enjoy using this website to explore and find bilingual books just to their liking.

(Evaluated by Marissa Rosenstein)

TumbleBooks: http://www.tumblebooks.com/library/asp/home_tumblebooks.asp

Is a great Website for children who are learning how to read or already know how to read but are trying to further their reading level. On this Website children can choose from thousands and thousands of books for the computer to read to them. This is great for the beginning learner because as they read along they can see the word and also hear how the word is pronounced. The site also has Spanish books available for English language learners as well. This would be great way for the children to also get to know their neighborhood library because this program will give the children access not only at school but at libraries in their area. When I tried to access this site and review it I couldn’t full access everything in the site. The site didn’t allow me to see the books but I could hear the audio. This could become a problem if the site has a continous technical problem that I encountered, it won’t allow the children to get the full effect and advantages of the site. Now if the children are already reading the book on their own and have hard copy, it won’t that much of an issue. As for the classroom, for the students who need extra help with their reading and the teacher cannot get to every student at once. The teacher can send certain children to the computers to listen to the book while she works with another student and they switch them. So that way the child is getting that reinforcement of pronouncing the correct words. The child can sound out the words they do not know, say what they think the word is and then listen to how its being pronounced. However, teachers should not use this as a substitution for one on one with the teacher. The student could just sit over in front of the computer listens to the book and not make an effort to try to actually read it for themselves. By continuing the one on one time with the teacher, the teacher can evaluate the progress of the child.

(Evaluated by Candyce Pace)

Reading Rockets: Teaching kids to read and helping those who struggle: http://www.readingrockets.org/

Reading Rockets is a great website for children that are struggling to read in any language, need to further their skills, or for people who are trying to teach children to read. It offers resources for teachers, children, parents, librarians, and people of other professions. It is also offered in Spanish for non-English speakers. There are strategies offered for teaching children, thousands of articles posted about how to help with second language acquisition, blogs about helping children learn to read, and a section with long lists of great books for children learning to read. This website is great because it reaches out for children of all skill levels, many different languages, and who struggle in many different areas of literacy.

If you go to the Home page, there are categories you can search on the side of the page. Under the Children’s Books section of the website, there are long lists of books that can help children read. If you go to Books by Themes, it will give you lists of books that will be very helpful for language learners. They have audio books, digital books, picture books, and many more categories. One of the downfalls is that you cannot buy all of the books through this website. You can find them in libraries, or specially order some of them. All of the books have Descriptions under them, or will send you to another website that gives you more of a variety. There is a space for people to comment under the description of the book to give feedback on it. This can be very helpful for people trying to find useful books. The website is easy to navigate and has many options for children to find helpful books; however there is not a specific category for second language learners, so you may have to search more.

There is one thing offered called the Family Literacy Bag which includes a fiction and non- fiction book, a hands-on craft project, an imagination activity, a get real activity, and a bookmark. This packet is offered in English or in Spanish. I think this would be great thing for children to use at home or in the classroom. In the classroom I could have the children search for books which might be of interest to them. However, I think this website is more beneficial for teachers or parents to pick books that would benefit the children. Therefore, I could use this resource to structure my class, find good strategies, and pick books that will help children in all areas. It tells me what books are good for what part of learning, and activities that I can incorporate into the lesson to help further the children’s language acquisition. This site does an amazing job at giving books, strategies, and games for teaching children. I will definitely use this site when I become a teacher.

(Evaluated by Micah Morgan)