Reading is crucial for a child’s mental and academic development. A recent study states that reading sparks creativity and stimulates imagination among children. In addition, this digital age has made reading interactive with various reading websites for kids of all ages.
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Many free educational reading websites for kids are now available to help teachers and parents. In addition, indulging your students in extra reading material than standard curriculum helps them develop their taste in different languages and literature.
So, let’s walk through this post to explore the best kids reading websites and how to encourage your students to read more.
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20+ Best Reading Websites for Kids
1. SplashLearn
Grade Level: PreK–5
SplashLearn stands out as one of the best online reading websites for its unique digital library designed to merge education with fun. Each book includes options for “Read to Me” or “Read by Myself” features, beautiful illustrations that bring stories to life, and interactive sound effects to enhance the reading experience. Here are the categories available:
- Read Alouds: Designed for instructional reading, these books help enhance listening skills, comprehension, and vocabulary. They are perfect for parents or teachers to read aloud.
- Leveled Readers: These books use specific phonetic patterns, sentence structures, and vocabulary to match different reading levels. As children improve, they progress to more complex texts.
- Decodable Books: Perfect for beginners, these books focus on phonics and help children practice sounding out words independently.
- Bedtime Stories: A collection of soothing tales perfect for bedtime, offering a calm end to the day and promoting parent-child bonding.
Beyond its diverse story offerings, SplashLearn stands out for its comprehensive curriculum-aligned resources that span from phonics to comprehension. It includes:
- Interactive Reading Games: Engaging and educational, these games are designed to reinforce phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension skills in a fun and interactive way. Check it out here.
- Reading Worksheets: These worksheets complement the reading material, offering exercises that enhance understanding and retention of the content, thereby solidifying comprehension skills. Check out fun printable worksheets here.
Teachers and parents can track their kid’s reading progress through these varied activities, ensuring a comprehensive approach to developing literacy. This blend of educational tools and storytelling creates a holistic reading environment for kids. Here is how you’d be able to track their progress:
2. Starfall
Grade Level: Pre-K to 3rd
Starfall is a great reading website for kids to improve their alphabet phonics, recognition, and spelling. This reading website offers skill improvement and strengthening material for kids of all ages. Starfall contains reading material like stories, poems, comics, Greek myths, Chinese fables, and more. There are also many videos and illustrations available to engage early readers.
3. Storyline Online
Grade Level: Pre-K to 3rd
Storyline Online is a free reading website for students. The reading material on the website helps to improve comprehension and reading fluency. The best thing about this reading portal is that it contains storybooks narrated by famous celebrities’ voices, including Oprah Winfrey, Rami Malek, Viola Davis, and others. In addition, reading material is supported with lesson plan ideas, activities, and subtitles.
4. Epic!
Grade Level: Pre-K to 6th
A digital reading platform that offers a variety of publications, non-fiction, fiction, and other books. On this website, teachers can monitor their students’ progress and reading skills and ensure they read assigned materials. Epic! has more than 40,000 books for kids up to 12 years.
5. International Children’s Digital Library
Grade Level: Pre-K to 3rd
Are you looking for a free educational reading website for kids? If so, the International Children’s Digital Library is the best place. It was founded by the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation to promote global literature. You can expose your children to multilingual books in over 59 languages and help them connect with different cultures. This is a perfect reading library to enhance your students’ cultural knowledge and language skills.
6. Read Works
Grade Level: Pre-K to 7th
Read Works is one of the best reading websites for elementary students. You can find several passages based on different reading levels and grade levels. Further, you can print those passages along with questions and give them to your students for practice. This website is perfect for improving reading comprehension and understanding among your kids.
7. Oxford Owl
Grade Level: Pre-K to 5th
Oxford University has created this website to help students improve their reading skills through books and stories. It is a comprehensive place for teachers to find interactive reading material for their students. Every session comes with guided lessons and emphasis on skills that the student can learn through it, like phonic comprehension, vocabulary enhancement, etc.
Related Reading: How to Improve Kids' Vocabulary: 11 Best Tips
8. PBS Reading Games
Grade Level: Pre-K to 3rd
PBS Reading Games is the ultimate reading website for kids, with free interactive videos, games, and other reading materials. It has over 70 reading-themed games to improve phonics and comprehension. PBS also offers printable books and activities to practice in your class. Besides, you will get various reading materials, including poems, vocabulary, rhymes, etc.
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9. Storynory
Grade Level: Pre-K to 5th
Storynory is one of the best online reading websites for students. You can introduce this website to your students, and they can listen to audio lessons and improve their reading skills without anyone’s help.
10. Reading Rockets
Grade Level: Pre-K to 3rd
Reading Rockets is a national reading library designed to help students who are struggling to read. This reading website contains comprehensive material for teachers and parents to support students with reading difficulties. Teachers can use free reading resources in multiple ways to encourage and motivate their students to read more.
11. StoryPlace
Grade Level: Pre-K to 3rd
StoryPlace is the best reading website for preschoolers. The website has interactive reading material with videos. There are many elements, such as movements, colors, and brightness, on this storytelling website that can keep young students engaged and motivated to read more.
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12. PebbleGo
Grade Level: 3rd to 5th
PebbleGo is a research resource for elementary children. The website includes several texts on animals, history, and science with a read-along feature. It offers a helping guide to readers who are struggling. However, it has extensive and paid reading resources that require a school sign-on code to log in.
13. Vooks
Grade Level: Pre-K to 3rd
Vooks creates a self-learning environment for students. It offers self-paced narration that students can follow along with the highlighted text. This helps to improve reading comprehension, fluency, focus, and more. With Vooks, you can create a joyful reading experience for your students.
14. Bookshare
Grade Level: 3rd to 5th
Bookshare is the best reading website for kids who struggle to read. It is an audiobook site that celebrates good books and learning. You can motivate your students to read more with audio and highlighted text. In addition, it has tailored lessons for students struggling with dyslexia, blindness, cerebral palsy, etc.
15. Funbrain
Grade Level: Pre-K to 8th
Funbrain is an interactive and free reading website that offers engaging reading games, books, and principles. It is a perfect website for preschoolers and elementary school kids. You can find many great publications on Funbrain, like the Diary of a Wimpy Kid multi-book collection.
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16. Read Write Think
Grade Level: K-12th
Write Think is a writing program supported by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). This online reading resource contains printables, lesson plans, and activities to help homeschooling students. It is a comprehensive reading website that parents and teachers can use to help children.
17. Storytime From Space
Grade Level: Pre-K to 5th
As the name suggests, Storytime from Space is the website where stories come from space. NASA astronauts videotape themselves reading books about space and the Earth and share them with students. So, to spike your students’ interest in space and science, you can refer to this website.
18. TumbleBookLibrary
Grade Level: Pre-K to 5th
TumbleBookLibrary provides animated and non-animated books for students. There are also many visual books, graphic novels, and video curriculums are also available. You can find books in both French and Spanish.
To log in to this library, you need a school code.
19. Free Rice
Grade Level: 2nd to 12th
This website improves kids’ English vocabulary and motivates them to help others. Whenever students answer correctly while playing vocabulary games, the United Nations World Food Programme will donate a bowl of rice to the less fortunate.
20. Harry Potter Reading Club
Grade Level: 2nd to 8th
If you want to motivate your students to read books, you can get them to join the Harry Potter book club. Reading all the excellent Harry Potter books and interacting with other readers will motivate and encourage your students to read more magical and whimsical books. Also, many writing competitions, reading challenges, and other activities are organized on this website.
21. Reading Bear
Grade Level: Pre-K to 1st
Reading Bear is a reading website for early readers. It helps students recognize the alphabet and create sounds to form a proper word. It helps to clear basic concepts of English vocabulary. They also have quizzes and phonetic English lessons present to guide preschoolers.
22. Reading IQ
Grade Level: Pre-K to 7th
It is another best reading website for elementary students. Teachers can get free access to this website to provide their students with various fictional and non-fictional reading material. Reading IQ is a simple website with various reading resources based on grade level.
How to Choose the Best Reading Website From This List
To choose the best reading website from the list, consider these points:
- Age Appropriateness: Select sites that match your child’s reading level and age.
- Interests: Look for websites with content that aligns with your child’s interests.
- Educational Value: Choose sites that offer a balance of fun and learning.
- Feedback and Progress Tracking: Opt for platforms that provide feedback on your child’s reading progress.
3 Techniques to Figure Out Your Students’ Reading Levels
Before scouring the best reading sites for kids, you should first assess the reading level of your students. Usually, a child’s reading level is linked to their grade level.
However, some kids have more advanced reading skills than their grade level. So, these are some techniques that you can use to determine individual kids’ reading levels:
- Lexile Framework: It is a tool that ranks books based on the difficulty level and scores them on a Lexile scale. This scale describes a child’s reading ability and matches them to books and other reading materials.
- Guided Reading Level: GRL is a one-on-one reading-level examination process. In this technique, teachers give books to students designed for their grade levels and take notes while they read. This technique is useful for determining the reading level of individual students in your classroom.
- Developmental Reading Assessment: DRA is a standard reading test for students. Teachers set this test based on their students’ grade level. In this test, teachers monitor while students read and rank their skills based on several factors like phonemic awareness, fluency, reading comprehension, etc.
5 Ways to Help Struggling Readers in Your Class
1. Scaffold
As already mentioned at the beginning of the article, selecting suitable reading material based on a student’s reading level is very important. If you choose reading material lower than your student’s reading level, they will learn nothing. On the contrary, if you choose complex reading material, it will reduce their morale. Therefore, you should use the scaffold technique and create a good reading curriculum to support your students.
2. Make them listen
Teachers should first read aloud to their struggling readers and then request them to repeat after them. When students listen to your words, they will learn to speak them too. This technique is effective for children suffering from sensory disorders like dyslexia.
3. Make them read
Teachers should motivate students to read in front of the entire class. This will make students conscious and active in reading. In addition, when students overcome their stage fright early in life, they can gain the confidence and courage to express their feelings freely.
4. Explore their area of interest
Reading about science, history, and other academic subjects might not appeal to many students. Therefore, teachers should indulge students in literature niches like fiction, non-fiction, biographies, science fiction, etc. This will help students find the reading material in their area of interest.
5. Promote shared reading
Many kids might feel conscious while reading alone in front of the entire class. In this case, you can promote shared reading in your classroom. This way, one student will read one paragraph, and another student will read the next paragraph, and so on. This will create harmony and coordination among your students.
Let’s Explore The Best Reading Websites for Kids!
There you go! You have explored fun reading websites for kids to improve their language fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. You can spike your students’ interest in reading and improve their writing/speaking skills with a little extra reading.
Frequently Asked Questions(FAQs)
What are some of the best reading websites for teachers?
SplashLearn stands out as one of the best interactive reading websites for teachers, offering a variety of free resources such as leveled readers, decodable books, and interactive stories across different categories, making it a versatile tool for enhancing reading skills in the classroom
Which reading materials are the best to improve reading skills?
The best materials to enhance students’ reading skills are magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias, story books, poetry, instruction manuals, comics, etc.
Which is the most helpful reading technique for students?
Some of the best reading techniques for kids are skimming, scanning, active reading, detailed reading, and structure-proposition-evaluation. However, reading aloud with highlighted text is the best technique for young students.
How do you choose reading materials?
To select the appropriate reading material for your children, consider the students’ interests and needs. You can make students read different reading resources and observe their interest levels.
What are some good reading websites for kids to learn how to read?
Websites like SplashLearn offer interactive and engaging content to teach kids how to read, starting from the basics like phonics and simple words, to more advanced reading materials.
