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This site has lesson plans and activities for reading.

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Activities and Lesson Plans to Increase Reading Skills and Comprehension. Find a variety of reading-related lesson plans, activities, book units & much more.

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This site has lesson plans for various grade levels K-12.

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We have hundreds of standards-based lesson plans written and reviewed by educators using current research and the best instructional practices. Find the perfect one for your classroom.

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Here is a link to the Montana Content Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy

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Montana Content Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy - K-12 › Montana Teach

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The best of Montana's ready-to-go classroom resources.

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This site has free printable reading worksheets and articles.

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Reading Worksheets, Spelling, Grammar, Comprehension, Lesson Plans

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Reading Worksheets, Spelling, Grammar, Comprehension, Lesson Plans -

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Reading worksheets and articles for parents and teachers, covering sight words, vocabulary, reading comprehension, grammar, and other reading essentials.

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This website has links to ten different websites that help children with reading. Some of them include ideas on how to incorporate them into lesson plans. The list included PBS and BBC games.

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The Best Free Reading Websites for Elementary Students

Children become fluent in reading with practice, practice, practice. As a teacher and educational technology integrator, I've used these free, engaging reading games to hold their attention and keep them motivated. They are among the best methods for turning the hard work of learning to read into play. You might introduce your child to these websites while school is out of session or as an after-school activity-or just for some educational fun at any time!

10 Free Sites to Help Kids Practice Reading

These 10 excellent sites for pre-K and elementary children are backed by a tremendous amount of research into how kids learn to read and how they become fluent readers.

1. Between the Lions

2. Starfall

3. StoryPlace

4. Storyline Online

5. ReadWriteThink Student Interactives

6. PBS Reading Games

7. WordWorld

8. Storynory

9. OxfordOWL

10. ABCya

What Software Do I Need?

Many of these games, activities, and videos can be played through your browser, so no special software is needed. Some of the websites require the Adobe Flash Player plug-in, though, which is free to download.

1. Between the Lions

PBS LearningMedia hosts some terrific educational material for children, and its Between the Lions video resources are among the best. There are read-along folktales and fables with a twist, clever song videos of letter sounds, and many more amusing stories and catchy songs to capture kids' attention. The videos are short, with most ranging from 20 seconds to 6 minutes in length, so it's easy for children to watch a variety of them-or to re-watch a favorite several times.

Skills Covered

The videos for preschoolers cover phonological awareness, letter knowledge awareness, vocabulary and language development, and even book and print awareness (like the catchy "Reason to Read" video).

The videos for K-1 students incorporate the basic building blocks of reading skills using phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.

These learning resources and the lessons they teach are memorable. In fact, my teenage daughter has fond memories of Between the Lions, and I had to tear her away from this website so I could finish this review!

Is It Really Free?

Yes. All of the videos are free to watch, and there are no ads on the website.

2. Starfall

Age Range: Pre-K to 3rd grade
Publisher: Starfall Education Foundation
Format: Read-along library, games, interactive activities
Cost: Free, although some materials require a paid subscription

Starfall Education (a nonprofit that focuses on free and low-cost learning resources for children) has created an engaging group of games and activities that range from the ABCs to fables. The stories and poems can be read by the narrator or by your child, with or without assistance. Your child can read the text on the screen and click on a word they need help with.

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10 Free and Fun Elementary Reading Websites for Kids

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Children become fluent in reading with practice. Help them build their skills with free, engaging reading games and videos that will hold their attention and keep them motivated. These websites offer a great way to keep kids learning outside of school.

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This site has activities for teaching reading, as well as a list of other relevant websites.

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Reading Resources For The Classroom - Teacher Resources | Book Adventure

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Find the fun ideas, informative articles and online tools you need to build your student's reading skills and confidence.

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This page has lesson and unit plans for teaching reading.

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Teaching Tools | Resources for Teachers from Scholastic

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This site has resources for assessment, reading and writing, spelling, vocabulary, leveled reading, phonics, phonemic awareness, and more.

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Get up-to-date research and best practices to help you build students' literacy skills and create a love of reading.

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This website has a lot of videos and webcasts on many subjects , including techniques for teaching reading with Common Core, STEM and teaching English Language Learners.

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Our PBS series explores reading and writing development in young children. The programs feature top reading experts, best practices in the classroom, support for struggling learners and how parents can help their kids succeed.
Watch our shows online >

Learn from national experts on topics including RTI, assessment, differentiated instruction, comprehension, early literacy, supporting English language learners, educational media and more.
Watch our webcasts online >

Reading and writing in the classroom

Our strategy library provides teachers with effective, research-based classroom strategies to help build and strengthen literacy skills in the following areas: print awareness, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.

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Our PBS series explores reading and writing development in young children. The programs feature top reading experts, best practices in the classroom, support for struggling learners and how parents can help their kids succeed. Watch our shows online > Learn from national experts on topics including RTI, assessment, differentiated instruction, comprehension, early literacy, supporting English language learners, educational media and more.

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This site includes activities, worksheets, and resources for working with students with dyslexia.

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an easy to understand explanation of necessary reading skills

Teaching reading IS rocket science and unfortunately the difficulty of learning to read and teaching it has been underestimated, one reason why many children develop reading problems. For an in-depth review of what expert literacy teachers should know, click on the following link for valuable information: Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science!

Our experiences in literacy education, however, have taught us a very important lesson: KEEP IT SIMPLE! So let's focus on the most essential reading skills first. By doing this, we ensure the most important literacy skills are taught and we increase the likelihood all children will learn to read.

The five big ideas in reading

1. PHONEMIC AWARENESS - Part of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds in words. For example, taking the spoken word "dog" and separating it into three distinct sounds, /d/ /o/ /g/ requires phonemic awareness skill.

Why is phonemic awareness important? Simple. Because of it's strong correlation to reading fluency. The research is clear; children who develop strong phonemic awareness skills at an early age are more likely to become fluent readers and better spellers than children who do not. Read that last sentence again! Kids need strong phonemic awareness skills to support literacy development! When teaching reading, we must include phonemic awareness.

Parent Tips - Parents, make sure you are building phonemic awareness skills at home! PHONEMIC AWARENESS ACTIVITIES PAGE for FREE Phonological Awareness Activities and Phonemic Awareness Activities that you can download! Also, make sure phonemic awareness is explicitly taught in your child's kindergarten and first grade classrooms!

Want to learn more? Visit the Phonemic Awareness Page for more information and to learn which phonological awareness resources we recommend for parents and educators.

2. ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE - The understanding that letters are used to represent the speech sounds of our language. Children must demonstrate the ability to associate sounds with letters and use these sounds to form words. We use the letters of the alphabet often alone (basic code), often in two's and in groups of three and four (advanced code) to represent the sounds in our language.

In a perfect world, our written language would consist of just basic code. Every sound in our language would have just one letter assigned to it. Our written language would be very simple to decode. Teaching reading would be easy and reading and spelling problems would be few and far between. Unfortunately, our written alphabetic code contains advanced code. Quite frequently, sounds are represented by more than one letter and letters represent more than just one sound. The more advanced the code, the more difficult it is to crack that code. The more difficult it is to crack, the more difficult it is to read fluently. The better children understand the code the more automaticity they will develop.

Let us be very clear: Advanced code creates many of the reading and spelling problems our children experience. For dyslexics, the advanced code can be a nightmare. Here is the good news! When our code is taught properly, many of these literacy difficulties go away. So what is the key to our children learning to read? Effectively teaching them to break the code! This site is going to help you do this!

Parent Tips - Parents, be sure your children master the written code. Check out the READING ACTIVITIES I PAGE and the READING ACTIVITIES II PAGE!

Want to learn more about cracking the code? Visit the Reading Activities I Page Reading Activities II Page for free reading activities designed to help children develop great reading decoding and reading fluency skills.
3. READING FLUENCY - Reading Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with appropriate expression. Fluent readers demonstrate an effortless and automatic ability to read words in connected text. They read as if they were speaking.

Ultimately, the purpose for reading is comprehension. There is no point to reading if not to gain information. While reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading, reading fluency is the key to achieving it! Without sufficient reading fluency, children will not have sufficient comprehension. Let me reiterate this fact! If we want our children to comprehend we must teach them to be fluent first! Too often, this is the neglected goal of reading instruction and our children have suffered because of it. Thankfully, research has provided us with widely recognized reading strategies that sufficiently teach reading fluency. Our charge is to implement these strategies when teaching reading and purposely teach our children to read fluently.

ReadingResource.net provides you with simple methods to teach reading fluency!

Parent Tips - Have your children read aloud to you as much as possible. While silent reading serves a purpose, it is not a proven way to increase oral reading fluency!

Want proven strategies and teaching resources to promote reading fluency? Visit the Reading Activities I Page, Reading Activities II Page, and the Reading Fluency Page.

4. VOCABULARY - Vocabulary refers to the words we must know in order to communicate effectively. With relationship to reading, vocabulary plays an important role in two major ways.

When learning to read, children have a much more difficult time learning to read words that are not already a part of their oral vocabulary.

Vocabulary is very important to reading comprehension. Simply put, children cannot understand what they are reading without knowing what most of the words mean.

Children learn most of their vocabulary indirectly through everyday experiences but some vocabulary should be taught directly to support reading comprehension.

On the Reading Vocabulary page, we cover this broad topic in depth and highlight the type of vocabulary skills we find essential when teaching reading.

Parent Tips - Parents, read aloud to your children. This is a top strategy for building their vocabularies. Once they read fluently, encourage them to read extensively on their own. These are two of the best ways to expand vocabulary and oral expression skills.

Check out the Reading Vocabulary Activities Page for information on the best vocabulary teaching tools we have used when teaching reading plus many other great vocabulary activities and resources!

5. COMPREHENSION - Comprehension is the only reason for reading. Successful readers are able to extract useful knowledge from text. It is important to teach children active strategies to help them become active, purposeful readers. Keep this fact in mind though:

The highest predictor of a child's reading comprehension level is their ability to decode text! If one can understand the meaning of spoken language, they should be able to understand the meaning of written language. And the only way to be able to understand the meaning of written language is to be able to read it accurately and fluently.Because reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading, we can place too much emphasis on its direct instruction. This usually happens at the expense of teaching phonemic awareness, alphabetic principal and oral reading fluency. A mistake we have witnessed repeatedly in education. While traditional comprehension activities are important when teaching reading, they will not have any impact on a child's comprehension unless the child is reading accurately and fluently. When teaching reading, focus on creating fluent decoding skills as they underpin everything that follows!

Parent Tips - Talk about everything you see and do with your children. Their background knowledge is key to your child's reading comprehension.

Plenty of our favorite reading comprehension strategies, resources and free reading comprehension worksheets can be found on the Strategies for Reading Comprehension Page.

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Teaching reading IS rocket science and unfortunately the difficulty of learning to read and teaching it has been underestimated, one reason why many children develop reading problems. For an in-depth review of what expert literacy teachers should know, click on the following link for valuable information: Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science!

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Education.com provides teachers with lesson plan ideas and a variety of worksheets.

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US Department of Education Resources for Parents 

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US Department of Education Resources for Parents 

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The US Department of Education has a list of resources available for parents to explore. The first is Helping your Child Become a Reader, available on PDF via the link. This book has 12 activities and multiple different suggestions on how to improve literacy in young children. The book focuses on literacy for children birth-6 years-old.  While this book is intended for parents and intended for younger children it does have suggestions that could be applied to a kindergarten classroom or children who are behind in literacy.

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Reading Resources - Help My Child Read - Parents - ED.gov

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Fun activities parents can use to build children's language skills. Includes a reading checklist, typical language accomplishments for different age groups, book suggestions, and resources for children with reading problems or learning disabilities.

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This site provides lesson plans and activities for teaching reading for the elementary grades.

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Reading resources are increasingly in demand for their easy accessibility and their many benefits. Consequently, the number of resources available is also increasing.

Here are some fun reading worksheets, activities, and other reading resources that teachers can use to teach students to read.

Reading Resources For Teachers

Teachers trying to motivate or teach students to read can find lots of reading resources online. This includes printable worksheets, lesson plans, reading diaries for students, reading certificates for encouragement, fun activities, audio-visual aids, and tons of other resources that teachers can use in the classroom. Some teachers like to use audio hooks - audio extracts that stop just where the story gets interesting. The teacher can then hand out copies of the book, since students are much more likely to want to read the book after hearing the hook. For students who can read on their own, it is important to have the type of books they like to read. In some classes, this may amount to a very large collection of books. It is also important to ensure that the language of the books matches the reading abilities of the students. An alternative to stocking up on a large collection of books that meet these criteria is to use e-libraries to encourage reading.

Reading Resources Online

Regardless of profession, age or interests, there are reading resources for all kinds of people on the internet. Different organizations compile reading resources on subjects that are of importance to them. There are also websites that act as online libraries, with reading aids for a wide variety of subjects. Some of these e-libraries cater to to subscribers or registered members only, while other e-libraries provide reading resources for free. The books in the online libraries are usually in PDF format, and can be downloaded and read at any time.

The Usefulness of Online Reading Resources

Online reading resources are useful for people who do not want to accumulate a large collection of books. They are also useful for individuals who do not have access to libraries or do not have the time to go to one. It is very easy to find the right book in an e-library, because of the advanced search options available.

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Reading resources for teachers help teachers teach and motivate students to read. Teachers can also use JumpStart's collection of reading worksheets and activities to make reading fun for students. Book lovers and researchers can find lots of reading resources online.

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This website has links for literacy worksheets, tracking reading, leveled reading, making reading fun, creating poetry, make digital stories, and finding a new book to read.

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The Big List: 50 Elementary Literacy and Reading Websites

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By Whooo's Reading Blog Team There are so many resources available to you and your students online and we want to find all the best ones so you don't have to. This Big List is dedicated to reading websites and literacy resources for every K-12 teacher.

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This website provides a week by week support system for literacy development.

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From FreeReading

A structure to support literacy development

The week-by-week structure outlined below provides educators with guidance on how FreeReading activities and resources may be used to support intervention for students who are developing their literacy skills. This structure was designed based on leading research in the field of literacy development. It was developed for explicit, sequential, and systematic instruction that helps build, develop, and reinforce foundational literacy skills.

Where to start

First, read this page and the pages it links to (especially the strand pages listed at the top). Then print the first few weeks of instruction. Determine what week to start at as follows:

For kindergarten students at risk for reading, start at Week 1, Day 1.

For first grade students at risk for reading, start at Week 21, Day 1.

For students in other grades who are still developing literacy skills, educators should begin with the lessons and activities that best match their diagnosis of the students' needs.

If you have access to reading assessment tools, you can fine tune the best place to start the intervention for an individual student or small group. This is described below.

Specific literacy skills are addressed through this 40-week structure, including:

Weeks 1-5: Basic phonological awareness (rhyming, onset-rime, introduce phoneme blending and segmenting); letter sounds; letter writing.

Weeks 6-10: Segmenting first, last, and middle phonemes; continue letter sounds and letter writing; begin sounding out (CVC and CVCC words).

Weeks 11-15: Phoneme substitution; continue letter sounds and letter writing; continue sounding out (stop sounds and CVCC words); introduce word-form recognition; introduce irregular (sight) words.

Weeks 16-20: Complete letter sounds and letter writing; continue sounding out (CCVCC and CCCVCC words) and word-form recognition; more irregular words.

Weeks 21-25: More irregular words; introduce letter combinations; introduce VCe words.

Weeks 26-30: Accelerate the introduction of irregular words; continue letter combinations.

Weeks 31-35: Complete letter combinations; more irregular words; begin advanced phonics (word families, double-letter words, silent-letter words, compound words, contractions, -ed and -s words); introduce reading connected text.

Weeks 36-40: More irregular words; longer connected text passages fiction and nonfiction up to 80 words.

Adjusting the intervention as you deliver it

As you will see, the directions for activities in FreeReading are explicit, but educators should use these as guidelines and adjust to fit their specific needs.

If you complete sessions early and students seem to find the material too easy, consider jumping ahead in the program. Make sure that all the students in the group are ready for this (if some are and some are not, regrouping students may be necessary).

You will notice that the lesson formats of FreeReading follow a consistent pattern. This helps lessons fit a daily routine and allows you to focus your attention on the content of the lesson and individual students rather than on the way the lessons are presented.

Using assessments with Intervention A

It is strongly recommended that you assess and monitor the progress of at-risk students. This will enable you to:

Place students at the right starting point

Accelerate or decelerate based on progress

Determine whether the interventions are effective for a student or a group

Choose an assessment that (a) can be quickly administered and scored, (c) gives reliable and valid guidance on whether a student is at risk, (b) allows progress to be monitored, and (d) provides sufficient diagnostic information to place a student in the program. There are many available assessments. One that meets the above criteria and is widely used is DIBELS.

Program resources

FreeReading includes many high-quality materials for classroom use. These include:

The resources provided here are:

Explicit: The teacher gives explicit instruction and then models all skills being taught. Correction routines are also made explicit.

Systematic: The structure includes multiple overlapping sequences of instruction, each addressing a critical skill.

Research-based: You can see references here.

A key feature of the pedagogy is the use of an Introduce, Reintroduce, Build Accuracy, Build Fluency progression. By accuracy we mean helping students discriminate between similar items such as letters m and n or irregular words this and that. By fluency we mean helping students become automatic in foundation skills such as blending.

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FreeReading is an open-source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. FreeReading contains a 40-week scope and sequence that can supplement an early literacy core or basal program.