Updated on October 26, 2018
Dozens of games, sites, and apps hold the interest of beginning readers. Learning to read is hard work and takes lots of practice. These games and sites feature fun and colorful interactives with animations to engage children as they practice their skills in letter sounds, phonics, phonemic awareness and sight word recognition. Some of the websites also help kids learn word patterns and word families.
Read reviews of some of the best in these articles:
Sightwords.com offers free strategies, lessons, games and tips for teaching reading to beginning readers. Several experienced teachers and education professionals authored this site. Lessons are geared to children ages 3-5. The resources include printable cards to play the sight word…
In this pilot project, Reading Rockets provides K-3 teachers with guidance, tips and suggestions for teaching beginning readers and struggling readers. There are 10 self-paced modules of instruction on print awareness, sounds of speech, phonemic awareness, phonics, informal assessments, fluency,…
PBS Kids has more than 60 reading games for beginning readers, narrated by much-loved characters from their popular TV series, such as Elmo, Martha Speaks, Clifford and Caillou. Paint by letter with Alpha Pig. Help WordGirl catch the Butcher. Dance…
These literacy games from BBC Schools emphasize phonics, rhyming words, alphabetical order, spelling, pronouns, conjunctions, synonyms, punctuation and sentence construction, deductive reasoning, and using dictionaries. Because it is a UK based site, pronunciation and spelling of some words will be…
Between the Lions has reading games, folktales and fables, and video songs to help kids learn key reading skills. The characters and music are engaging, and the activities are rooted in research about the best methods for helping kids learn…
The Alphabetimals are cartoon animals shaped like the letters of the alphabet to help kids learn their ABCs. On the site is a free interactive book and video with each character animated, and options to hear their animal sound and their name…
NeoK12 Phonics videos is a series of videos to help preschool kids and beginning readers learn the alphabet sounds and basic sight words. All videos and lessons on this site have been reviewed by K-12 teachers and are safe for kids.
The StoryPlace is a Children’s Digital Library for preK-2 beginning readers It has engaging, colorful interactive stories, activities and videos on a variety of themes. Some of the themes are babies, bath time, animals, colors, pets and shapes. Their stories…
Please note: The hosting site has been redesigned and no longer carries this activity. The link provided above is to an archived version of the game, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. In the Monkey Business game, you have to put…
From site: For many children, learning to read turns out to be the most difficult thing they will ever undertake. Why is this so? How can parents and teachers help all children to succeed? Come into The Reading Treehouse, and…
From site: The site is home to a package of interactive games, stories and resources that have been developed to help emerging readers learn to read. The site can be used at school or at home. It’s one of the…
RIF offers beginning readers several ebook stories for beginning readers in English and Spanish. The online version is in pdf format. The real gem is the app versions of their stories. They are available for Android, and Kindle Fire. (Sorry,…
This BBC website offers a variety of online interactive games and offline activities to help beginning readers learn key reading skills. These include CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) patterns, consonant clusters, long vowel sounds, and high frequency words. Although the site is aligned…
From site: The phonic monsters are a fun way to learn and practice phoneme-grapheme correspondences. The phonic monsters are a series of 18 plus words that contain all of the phonemes in the English language and most of the basic…
This series of brief videos discusses: the Alphabetic Principle, the Sounds of the Alphabet, Phonemic Segmentation, Spelling Rules, the Importance of the Alphabetic Principle, and Phonics vs. Whole Language. Experts and teachers discuss illustrate the importance of phonics in the…