Starfall ABC’s

The basics. This website activity introduces the basics of letter shapes and sounds along with a section to learn the vowels. Very interactive and simple to navigate. It also provides fun animations and sounds to keep young audiences engaged. As an added bonus it also includes a section to learn your ABC’s in sign language.

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Starfall Learn to Read

A bunch of small activities and games to play to introduce the basics of reading full words. Again the presentation of these games and activities are presented in a very high-quality user-friendly manner. It also includes a section for users to read alongside with audiobooks. These books move very slowly through a story and break down each word making it easy for users to follow along and learn the components of different words.

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Starfall Its’ Fun to Read

In this section are activities exploring readings functions. Lots of different categories to explore and play around with.  Its sections include All About you, Art Gallery, Magic, Music, Poetry, Tongue Twisters, and Riddles. All will present the user with interactive games to play and stories to read about the chosen topics.

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Starfall I’m Reading

This is the last section of the Starfall reading activities and introduces users to full audiobooks to read alongside. It bolsters an impressive library of comics, fairy tales, myths, fables, fiction and non-fiction books!

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Audiobooks are useful tools that can be used and found on multiple forms of digital devices. With Audiobooks, readers can with ease simply listen to a text. Below are some of the sites I’ve found that have a collection of free audiobooks.

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Audiobook Sites

Storynory

This is a great website for younger students. You’ll find original stories, myths & fairy tales, and even poems. Along with audio of the books the site also includes a written version, so users can follow along as they listen.

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Loyal Books

This website contains a huge library of audiobooks. The books themselves are a little more advanced so its perfect for the more intermediate ages.

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Storyline Online

Storyline Online bolsters an impressive sized library of audiobooks. They also go a step further and present each story with exceptional quality. The site will often have celebrities or people of note read the stories to you. They also sprinkle in some animations and visuals to keep engagement high. Overall awesome site.

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Text to speech programs allows individuals to have texts read aloud to them and are great assistive tools for individuals who may struggle with reading. Below I will provide some fantastic programs that I found and tried that are free, and readily available.

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Read&Write for Google Chrome

In-depth Instructional Video for Read & Write

Having tried Read & Write myself it really is an easy to use Google extension that can be used on any computer running on the Google Chrome browser.

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Text Fairy (OCR Text Scanner)

In-depth Instructional Video for Text Fairy

This app honestly seems like magic to me. Playing around with it I found it consistently scanned and provided me with a flawless digital copy of the texts I scanned. It then could read aloud the texts. For the best results make sure to take a picture of text in a well-lit room. Huge bonus this app doesn’t contain nor spam any annoying ads or pop-ups!