Reviews

Kidsspell
http://www.kidsspell.com/

Kidsspell is a educational website for children that specifically need help in spelling.  Although it is helpful for the topic of spelling, it doesn’t offer activities for other aspects of reading.  Kidsspell offers activities for both younger children and older children and we see many ways this site could be used by a teacher working with emergent literacy learners.  However, this website does not offer an extraordinary amount of different activities.  It does offer activities to help the child sound out words and fill in the missing blanks with the correct letters.  The site is colorful and attractive for young children.  Overall, we think this site is a good place to find activities of a child who is interested in or needs help in the spelling area.


PBS Kids - Games
http://pbskids.org/games/index.html

Children love websites like this because it uses characters from books and television programs that they already know.  Also, the shows that are on PBS television are more educational than a majority of other children's TV programming, so it's a "win win" situation. When educational activities include characters that excite them, they become more interested in the activity and the story that the character came from as well. The website is fast-loading and uses bright colors with large kid-friendly buttons to navigate the pages. It offers many fun literacy and rhyming games with characters from Sesame Street, Arthur and Curious George.  We found Lickety Letter Bingo to be quite fun! Also, the Super Grover rhyming activity was highly interactive and was a great way to learn word families. 




Fisher Price - Preschool Games
http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?st=2602&e=gamesByAge&mcat=game_preschool


We werent all that impressed even though this is a very child-friendly website.  Unfortunately,  the majority of activities aren't educational. Many of the games on here are simply for fun or to get children interested in buying/using one of their products.  Although, We found "Fun Phonics" game very useful.  We agreed that we'd likely use that activity with students at some point.  Aside from that one activity the website didn't offer much in regards to emergent literacy as it mostly had coloring activities and memory games.




Fun Brain

www.funbrain.com



We found FunBrain is quite true to its name.  The website offered “fun” games and activities for beginning and middle of the road readers.  The activities were engaging and centered on modern television shows and popular books for young readers.  The website was not only colorful and intriguing to the eye but also presented brain thumping challenges, trivia, and tests.  We also liked that this website contains activities surrounding topics that others overlook.  For example, Funbrain has activities that help the children learn a new foreign language and sign language.  The website also offers all different kinds of help for literature including electronic books, spelling, reading comprehension, word confusion, roots words and using plurals.  All of the activities offer the viewer to participate in either a beginner or intermediate level which allows the age range to be greater than other sites.  We decided this website would be appropriate for ages  5 to 15.  We feel the website is fairly child friendly, presenting many easy to understand directions for simple yet challenging activities.  We recommend Funbrain as a good website to introduce children to in an effort to better their reading development.


Storyline Online
http://www.storylineonline.net/

Storyline Online is a website that both of us were familiar with before starting this project. It's a website that was put together by the Screen Actors Guild. It has interactive read alouds of childrens books ready by celebrities like Vice President Al Gore , Elijah Wood and James Earl Jones. Each reader does an excelelnt job of applying charisma and different voices to the stories they read. Sean Astin in particular does a hilarious reading of A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shanon. These read alouds are great for emergent literacy learners. The extension activities would be a bit to difficult for emergent learners however the discussion questions that the website suggests would be great for building comprehensions kills for a young child. 


Fact Monster - Wordwise
http://www.factmonster.com/funfacts.html

This site offers a ton of brain candy with not so many activities. It does how have great explanations of grammar terms and concepts. It's a treasure trove of information rather than activities as it offers information about the national spelling bee and it's history rather than some sort of spelling activity. It has little known facts and history about the english language as well. A fun website, but definitely not for little children. The text is small and the site isn't all that easy to navigate. It also has a great deal of unrelated advertisement banners which are a bad sign. Could be good for educators and students looking for simple explanations about the intricacies of the english language and just some fun food for thought.






Kids Click
http://www.kidsclick.org/

Kids Click seems more like a research resource for kids above the emergent literacy level. In fact, it seems like useful tool for educators and parents more so than a tool for an emergent learner. The site offers a database of educational websites and activities. Some of the websites bring you to interactive material and some simply brings you to information about a certain topic. The goal of the website is to provide basically a safe online launch pad for web exploration. "Safe" as in the website will only lead you to "good" appropriate websites. This is very handy for when kids begin using the internet as a research tool. In fact, the website offers a handy page where all kid friendly search engines are located at one spot. How cool is that!?




Professor Garfield
http://www.professorgarfield.org/pgf_home.html


This highly interactive website swept us off of our feet. This site is extremely kid friendly from the very front page.  There are many reading activities and games with sounds and moving images.  There are activities that have students story mapping as well as word studying. The fishing phonics game in particular was fun and can help students learn word families. We found there to be a wide array of activities for emergent learners as well as those who have passed the emergent level.  There is also a "Teachers Lounge" section for Educators with lesson plans and other helpful ideas.  It's difficult to find anything on the entire website that isn't educational. The one main thing that wasn't educational but still impressive was it's Sparktop program. This is a social networking site for young students, however it is parent monitored and keeps students identities revealed. I think its a very cool program for the website and I could see how this site could be very useful for Parents who want to extend their children's education at home.


Starfall
http://www.starfall.com/


Starfall is an excellent website with many activities for emergent literacy learners. Unfortunately, the opening page isn't child-friendly as it has small text and small links. It would take some help for a young student to get to the activities. Once a student arrives at the activities page, they find a very child-friendly site with many large links and a nice simple layout to navigate. The site offers  a great deal of interactive story telling features. Each story that it offers has pre and post-reading activities that involved spelling, vowels and blends. This would be a very helpful site for emergent learner especially if an adult is helping guide the child through the activities. We thought that  large interactive alphabet was really cool because it not only offered the sounds of the letters but also how to sign the letter in ASL.



Crayola
http://www.crayola.com/lesson-plans/

This site offers a great deal of games but for educational material it would be better used by a teacher and a student. It offers fun and creative ideas in the lesson plans, mostly arts and crafts. But, the activities it offers would likely be great reading extension activities. For instance, It has a great thanksgiving activity that would like be appropriate after a read aloud. The one activity we found exciting was the story builder which would be great for a young student to work on with the help of an adult. Ultimately, this website doesn't offer much when it comes to explicit emergent literacy instruction. Also it should be noted that,  Crayola is ultimately trying to promote their product and that should be taken into consideration when looking for classroom ideas. Although, a student doesn't necesarlly need Crayola products specifically to do these activities.... crayons are crayons, right?

Scholastic
http://www.scholastic.com/

We found the Scholastic website a bit disapointing.  We expected a great deal more from a company that puts out so many quality books. However, they offer activities that extend from stories that could be used with emergent learners. Unfortunately, the games that are offered are mostly non-educational although they do feature characters that emergent learners might know from stories. In the"Writing Games" section there are activities appropriate for later elementary students. Unfortuantely,  there are no online interactive activities for emergent learners. What we found that would be most appropriate to use after a read aloud with emergent learners are some of the videos that Scholastic offers. They offer "Meet The Author" videos as well as trailers for stories similar to movie previews. This could be a very exciting way to grip a young audience before reading a story. The "Meet The Author" videos would be a great thing to show after having read a book by that author.