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Learn to Read with Starfall
Have a preschooler? Looking for help with teaching the ABC’s or reading? Just want to hear some catchy tunes and your kids laugh? You need to check out Starfall!
Starfall is a FREE website that has loads of activities, both online and printable, to help kids learn to read. Starfall has four levels of instruction. In each of these levels, clicking an individual word causes Starfall to read it aloud. In addition to the reading instruction, each page has something that kids can click to get an amusing animation.
Starting with the ABC’s section, kids select an individual letter and are presented with words that begin with the letter as well as the phonetic sound the letter makes. Each word is read, the sound emphasized and a cute animation follows. My kids (even the 10 year old) find the animations hysterical! When I hear them all cackling around the computer, it’s a good bet that they are on Starfall. Starfall even teaches the ABC’s in sign language!
The “Learn to Read” section leads kids from beginning three letter words through fifteen phonetic combinations. Each word family, such as long A, has games, a book, and sometimes an animated video. The games are cute; they show how words are built from the sounds. The books will read a short sentence. Again, the animations are cute and funny. Beware, though! The songs they sing are catchy and can get stuck in your head. I love the beatnik style song for two short vowels in the Soap Boat!
The next level is “It’s Fun to Read!” This level puts words together into simple sentences, under a variety of topics. Poetry, music, art, and riddles are a few of the topics. You can hear a Scott Joplin piano piece under the music section. Finally, once they’re really reading on their own, kids can check out the “I’m Reading!” area. This is a huge section with plays, fiction and non-fiction writings, comics, folk tales, Greek myths and Chinese fables.
The Download Center has tons of printable worksheets to reinforce everything that has been learned online. The online store has a selection of books, stickers, stuffed animals with the Starfall characters. I haven’t purchased any of their products, but the book prices look very reasonable.
If you’re just looking for some fun, try the activities on Starfall’s homepage such as Snowman or Turkey. Like the ABC section, my kids find these highly amusing; I usually have to “Check this out! Look at that turkey!” constantly.
Before you know it, you’ll be singing along with me, “When two vowels go a walkin’, the short vowel does the talkin.’”
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My son still loves this. He was one that could of cared less about letters until I discovered that site. I have just recently discovered Spellingcity.com. You can actually sign up and save his weekly spelling words and he can play games with them like Hangman, word search, etc. Also you can do a mini spell test too.
My kids love it still. They also like http://www.funbrain.com/
not my favorite but it does have some cool stuff to help them learn.
LOVE Starfall. We use it a lot for incoming “no English” students. It helps them acclimate better and makes English more accessible. There’s LOTS of stuff there, too. Kind of unrelated, but another excellent resource is http://www.enchantedlearning.com They have free content as well as subscription-based content. It’s priced really reasonably for schools and individuals (I think)
Or get a Bernie like Kim did.
That sounds like a great site!
Love that website!! Found it last year when my son was having a hard time with reading. LOVED the help it gave.